This question has come up more than I can count, so I am doing a super quick blog post to answer it for folks.
Many people are well aware of the limitations around exporting data in Power BI today. The biggest one I hear about is you can’t export more than 150,000 rows to Excel from a Power BI Report visual. Since people always want to export data, the question came to me immediately when we released the paginated report capabilities in Power BI if we had the same restriction. I know from several customers I’ve worked with in the past that many of their SSRS reports are/were nothing more than a single table with some parameters that users visit to dump out the data they need to an Excel or CSV file, so I wasn’t that surprised it came up.
The answer is no, we don’t put any cap on the number of rows you can export from a paginated report in Power BI to Excel, CSV, or any of the formats we support. The only limitation is the amount of memory that’s available for Paginated Reports in your Premium capacity. Hence the asterisk in the blog title – eventually you’ll run out of memory if you try to export too much at one time, so if you try to export a table of 1 trillion rows and 40 columns to a CSV file, I’m fairly sure you’re out of luck and will fail. But as you can see by the picture, I exported one of my reports with over 240,000 rows out to a CSV file without a hitch.
There’s much, much more you can do with Paginated Reports in Power BI (and Patrick LeBlanc has done some awesome videos about a number of those items on the Guy in a Cube YouTube channel), but for those folks who want to use paginated reports to help them with this use case, you absolutely can do so.
Thanks for reading!
Christopher Finlan 