Paginated Reports 101 – Building your first Paginated Report off of a Power BI dataset

If you’re a veteran user of the kinds of Power BI reports built using Power BI Desktop, you’re used to hearing about all the wonderful things Power BI can do, complete with exciting new updates every month. Power BI paginated reports get much less attention. From a marketing standpoint this makes perfect sense; Power BI analytical reports create beautiful, highly interactive data visualization reports that are great for helping end-users engage with their data, explore it, perform what-if analysis, and present it to others. Paginated reports? They don’t change much, and their main claim to fame is that they print off well.

While I fell in love with standard Power BI reports back in 2017, even I can admit that my favorite tool has some limitations. I discovered the most painful one at about 11 pm the night before a board meeting. Our board had requested we include a specific Power BI report in their “Board Book”. The report had a simple matrix, some conditional formatting, and a slicer by department—nothing fancy. Problem was, while this report worked beautifully on a computer screen, it was an absolute nightmare to print out for dozens of different departments. Suffice it to say I got very little sleep that night.

This would have been a perfect use case for a Power BI paginated report, though they weren’t yet available—and it’s what I always think back to when people imply that paginated reports are somehow obsolete. While I can’t go back in time to save myself from that wretched mess with the board books, this blog post is my attempt to save you from a similar reporting headache.

What is a Power BI Paginated Report? I’m so glad you asked!

I tend to think of Power BI paginated reports as Power BI’s older, less flashy sister. If you watched “The Good Place”, you can think of Power BI analytical reports as Good Janet; she’s friendly, the list of things she can do seems endless, and she can even offer useful insights and suggestions.

Paginated Reports are more like Neutral Janet from the accounting department. She’s not friendly or full of magic tricks, but she’s often what you need to get the job done (“end of conversation”).

Originally designed as part of SQL Server Reporting Services, paginated reports exist to provide “pixel perfect” output from a given source of data. Each paginated report is saved with the suffix “.rdl”, which stands for “report definition language”. If you’re used to creating standard Power BI reports, you may be familiar with how data can be imported, transformed, and stored within the .pbix file. In contrast, an .rdl file doesn’t store any underlying data. Instead, the .rdl file acts as a kind of ”recipe” for the report, defining the way that the underlying data will be presented when someone runs that report.

Exhibit A: Comparing “standard” Power BI reports and Power BI paginated reports

Paginated reports can be thought of as serving an operational purpose rather than an exploratory one.  Power BI analytical reports are intended to be highly interactive and to work on a range of different screens, which makes for a good online experience. To many report users, the most exciting part of a Power BI analytical report is the myriad of ways they can slice, dice, and drill; they’re empowered to both see the information in a report and explore why a data point of interest is the way that it is.

Paginated reports…are a little different.

While Power BI Paginated reports still allow end users to make limited data selections (called parameters), they’re more of a “just the facts, ma’am” kind of tool. If the purpose of a Power BI analytical tool is to help a report user explore the ”why” behind the data, you can think of paginated reports as being laser focused on providing the ”what”.

That sounds really boring, Lenore. Why should I bother with paginated reports when standard Power BI reports are so much more fun and shiny?

Listen, I hear you. Paginated reports fall under the “boring but essential” category of BI work, but “essential” is the most important word in this sentence. Remember my nightmare story with the board books from the beginning of this blog post? There are times when you truly need a straightforward table that prints off nicely. Many of those fun interactive Power BI analytical features just get in the way when you need a simple, consistently structured report.

OK, fine. When should I use Paginated Reports instead?:

I’m so glad you asked:) You’ll want to build a paginated report in any instance when:

1. The report needs to be precisely defined and structured, not interacted with.Example: If you need to create core financial reports (an income statement, balance sheet, and statement of cash flows), these generally require a specific format and structure that Paginated Reports excel at creating.
2. Multiple versions of a report need to be printed or emailed to different users based on their role.Examples:
   • A budget-to-actuals sales report that is emailed to the head of each department on the first day of the month
   • A Power Point slide of key data that every employee needs to include as part of their annual review presentation
   • An invoice template that is printed and mailed out to each customer
3. Instances where a report may need to be viewed either on paper or online, and where data exploration isn’t especially useful.

These kinds of operational reports often require information simply presented in a table format where any further gussying up would only get in the way. Your organization may need to email or upload periodic operational reports to banks, auditors, governmental agencies or insurance companies, for example. Internally, various documents such as lists of employees by department or manufacturing output by factory location may be most useful as a simple table without any further embellishment. These kinds of reports often can be made as a standard Power BI report but make more sense to build as a paginated report so they’re easy to print or export in the PDF or Excel structure that the recipients require.

Many corporate reports fall under this third category; you probably just won’t know about them unless you work in a department that uses or maintains them.

Uh-oh—sounds like I need to convert some of my Power BI Analytical Reports into paginated reports. What do I do?

Don’t panic—I’ll walk you through it!

If you’ve already created a report using Power BI Desktop, you can still make use of the underlying Power BI dataset that you’ve developed to support it. The tricky part is remembering that what works in Power BI Desktop doesn’t always translate into Power BI Report Builder—something we’ll be covering in the next few posts.