Category: Paginated Reports

An Exclusive Interview with Paginated Report Bear: The Fun Side of Reporting

Introduction

In the world of data analysis and reporting, we often get caught up in the technical aspects and overlook the fun side of things. Today, we’re excited to share an exclusive, light-hearted interview with the internet’s favorite data reporting mascot, Paginated Report Bear! Join us as we delve into the bear’s thoughts on paginated reports, Power BI, and what makes him so passionate about reporting.

The Interview

Me: Thank you for joining us today, Paginated Report Bear! Let’s start with the basics. How did you become so passionate about paginated reports?

Paginated Report Bear: Well, it all started when I stumbled upon a beautifully crafted paginated report in the woods. The way it presented the data in such a precise, pixel-perfect manner was mesmerizing. From that moment on, I knew I had found my true calling – to spread the joy of paginated reports to the world!

Me: That’s quite an inspiring story! What do you think makes paginated reports so special compared to other reporting formats?

Paginated Report Bear: Paginated reports are like a canvas for data. They allow you to design highly customizable, print-ready reports that can span multiple pages with ease. Plus, they’re perfect for handling complex data scenarios, and who doesn’t love the satisfying feeling of flipping through a beautifully formatted, multi-page report?

Me: So true! Now, we know you’re a big fan of Power BI. Can you tell us about your favorite features in Power BI for creating paginated reports?

Paginated Report Bear: Absolutely! I love how Power BI offers a seamless experience for designing paginated reports using the Power BI Report Builder. It’s packed with awesome features like Document Maps, Interactive Sorting, and Custom Pagination, which make it super easy to create dynamic, user-friendly reports. And let’s not forget the amazing Power BI community that’s always there to help and share their knowledge.

Me: You’ve definitely become an icon in the Power BI community. How does it feel to be such a beloved figure?

Paginated Report Bear: Oh, it’s truly humbling! I’m just a bear who loves paginated reports, and the fact that I can bring a smile to people’s faces while they’re working on their reports is simply heartwarming. I’m grateful for the opportunity to connect with the community and share my passion for paginated reports with everyone.

Me: Before we wrap up, do you have any tips or advice for Power BI users who are just starting to explore paginated reports?

Paginated Report Bear: Absolutely! First and foremost, don’t be afraid to experiment and try out different features – that’s how you’ll discover the true potential of paginated reports. Also, make use of the wealth of resources available online, such as tutorials, webinars, and blog posts, to enhance your skills. And remember, the Power BI community is always there to help, so don’t hesitate to ask questions and learn from fellow users. Most importantly, have fun with it!

Conclusion

We hope you enjoyed this lighthearted, exclusive interview with Paginated Report Bear! His passion for paginated reports and Power BI serves as a reminder that reporting and data analysis can be fun, engaging, and enjoyable. Keep experimenting, learning, and embracing the power of paginated reports – and don’t forget to have some fun along the way!

This blogpost was created with help from ChatGPT Pro.

Harnessing the Power of Azure Synapse Spark and Power BI Paginated Reports: A Comprehensive Walkthrough

In today’s data-driven world, organizations seek to harness the vast potential of their data by combining powerful technologies. Azure Synapse Spark, a scalable data processing engine, and Power BI Paginated Reports, a robust report creation tool, are two such technologies that, when combined, can elevate your analytics capabilities to new heights.

In this blog post, we’ll walk you through the process of integrating Azure Synapse Spark with Power BI Paginated Reports, enabling you to create insightful, flexible, and high-performance reports using big data processing.

Prerequisites

Before we begin, ensure you have the following set up:

  1. An Azure Synapse Workspace with an Apache Spark pool.
  2. Power BI Report Builder installed on your local machine.
  3. A Power BI Pro or Premium subscription.

Step 1: Prepare Your Data in Azure Synapse Spark

First, you’ll need to prepare your data using Azure Synapse Spark. This involves processing, cleaning, and transforming your data so that it’s ready for use in Power BI Paginated Reports.

1.1. Create a new Notebook in your Synapse Workspace, and use PySpark, Scala, or Spark SQL to read and process your data. This could involve filtering, aggregating, and joining data from multiple sources.

1.2. Once your data is processed, write it to a destination table in your Synapse Workspace. Ensure that you save the data in a format compatible with Power BI, such as Parquet or Delta Lake.

Step 2: Connect Power BI Paginated Reports to Azure Synapse Analytics

With your data prepared, it’s time to connect Power BI Paginated Reports to your Azure Synapse Analytics.

2.1. Launch Power BI Report Builder and create a new paginated report.

2.2. In the “Report Data” window, right-click on “Data Sources” and click “Add Data Source.” Select “Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics” as the data source type.

2.3. Enter your Synapse Analytics server name (your Synapse Workspace URL) and database name, then choose the appropriate authentication method. Test your connection to ensure it’s working correctly.

Step 3: Create a Dataset in Power BI Report Builder

Now that you’re connected to your Synapse Workspace, you’ll need to create a dataset in Power BI Report Builder to access the data you prepared earlier.

3.1. In the “Report Data” window, right-click on “Datasets” and select “Add Dataset.”

3.2. Choose the data source you created earlier, then write a query to retrieve the data from your destination table in Synapse Workspace. You can use either SQL or the Synapse SQL provisioned pool for this task. Test the query to ensure it retrieves the data correctly.

Step 4: Design Your Power BI Paginated Report

With your dataset ready, you can start designing your Power BI Paginated Report.

4.1. Drag and drop the appropriate data regions, such as tables, matrices, or lists, onto the report canvas.

4.2. Map the dataset fields to the data region cells to display the data in your report.

4.3. Customize the appearance of your report by applying styles, formatting, and conditional formatting as needed.

4.4. Set up headers, footers, and pagination options to ensure your report is well-organized and professional.

Step 5: Test, Export, and Share Your Report

The final step in the process is to test, export, and share your Power BI Paginated Report.

5.1. Use the “Preview” tab in Power BI Report Builder to test your report and ensure it displays the data correctly

5.2. If you encounter any issues, return to the design view and make any necessary adjustments.

5.3. Once you’re satisfied with your report, save it as a .rdl file.

5.4. To share your report, publish it to the Power BI Service. Open the Power BI Service in your browser, navigate to your desired workspace, click on “Upload,” and select “Browse.”

5.5. Upload the .rdl file you saved earlier, and wait for the publishing process to complete.

5.6. After your report is published, you can share it with your colleagues, either by granting them access to the report in the Power BI Service or by exporting it to various formats, such as PDF, Excel, or Word.

Conclusion

By combining the processing power of Azure Synapse Spark with the flexible reporting capabilities of Power BI Paginated Reports, you can create insightful, performant, and visually appealing reports that leverage big data processing. The walkthrough provided in this blog post offers a step-by-step guide to help you successfully integrate these two powerful tools and unlock their full potential. As you continue to explore the possibilities offered by Azure Synapse Spark and Power BI Paginated Reports, you’ll undoubtedly uncover new ways to drive your organization’s data-driven decision-making to new heights.

This blogpost was created with help from ChatGPT Pro.

Happy birthday, Paginated Report Bear!

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Paginated Report Bear turns 1 year old today.  He wasn’t expected to last more than a few weeks.

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For those of you who aren’t familiar with Paginated Report Bear, my friend Chris Webb described him as follows – “Well, he’s the breakout social media star of 2019, a furry YouTube sensation whose incisive interviews of members of the Power BI development team have become renowned for their deep technical content and insights into the Power BI roadmap. If you’re not watching his videos on YouTube, you’re missing out.”

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If you watch the very first video that “Padgie” did 1 year ago today, Chris’s description seems EXTREMELY generous.  The production quality was very low, and Mr. Matthew (my son) couldn’t even say “Paginated Reports”.  Why even do videos with a bear in the first place?  You see, my son had for some time wanted to do a YouTube video series with me where his stuffed animals would be included.  They had been granted various personalities and voices throughout the years by yours truly, and these characteristics have carried over to the videos.  I decided to rename “Mickey” to “Paginated Report Bear” because he was the lovable but dumb one, and I thought the name sounded ridiculous.  And since my (naïve) assumption was we’d do a few of these videos during my vacation, and my son would get tired of doing them, that would be that.  And that almost happened – there wasn’t any videos for a month from December to January, and I figured that was the end of it.

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Then something strange happened – not only did my son want to do more, but some members of the Power BI community seemed to actually ENJOY the videos.  He was featured on Guy in a Cube, he was mentioned on the BiFocal podcast, and he was a hit at the MVP Conference in March (he even got an MVP pin!).  It was then that we decided to have him start interviewing members of the product team, starting with Lukasz back in April, and the rest is history.

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But the biggest achievement of Paginated Report Bear is the one he’s taught my kids as they’ve watched their dad carry a cheap stuffed bear purchased from EBay to conferences across the country just so people can take a selfie with him – you can do something different, or be different, and be successful in your career and in life.  That means a lot, and shows the broad Power BI community can have an impact outside of the day to day product details.

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So thank you, and I look forward to what the future has in store for Paginated Report Bear in the year ahead!

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Free sample Power BI paginated report – Ultimate Export Report available for download

I recently came across an interesting article on MSSQLTips for SQL Server Reporting Services that showed how you could use a T-SQL query as the parameter value, and have it return a table of data as the result set from that query.  (The original article is here, and I will fully admit that all I did was take this author’s idea (and that of one of the commenters) and stick it into this sample report  – https://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/5757/create-dynamic-ssrs-reports-using-a-query-as-an-input-parameter/ ). I wanted to see if this worked for Paginated Reports in Power BI, and of course it does!  So once I put in my connection string information for my Azure SQL database (the original article was against a traditional SQL Server database), I can write just about any select query against that database as a parameter at runtime and get back results in a nice table that can be exported out to Microsoft Excel.  I created a short video to show you how it works in practice –

Now there’s little chance I’d use this report as is in production – it’s really just a way for me to test some things, dump out data quickly, and it demos nicely.  But there are some ways you could potentially change this to make it more production friendly – have a list of dropdown values that represent the queries that you update on an ongoing basis, or even allow users to submit queries through a workflow you approve that updates the parameter list.

If you’d like to try it out yourself, feel free to download the sample report –

Ultimate Export Report

Once downloaded, you’ll need to update the data source with your connection string to whatever database you’ll use this against in Power BI Report Builder before you can use it in the service, but once you do that, you should be good to go.

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Thanks for reading!

Use a Conditional Preview Image in Paginated Reports subscriptions in Power BI

Recently in Power BI, a new feature was added for Paginated Reports e-mail subscriptions where you could optionally add a preview image in the body of your e-mail message.  By default, this is the first page of your report.  However, it doesn’t have to be.  For example, in my e-mail subscription, I see the following preview image –

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But when I view the report in the PDF attachment or in the web, I see the following report links as my first page –

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How is this possible?

Well, one of the cool things you can do with Paginated Reports is set the visibility of items in your report to be conditional.  You do this by adding an expression that sets the condition for when it should be shown or hidden.  Since the preview image in your e-mail subscription uses the “IMAGE” output format, all I did was set the visibility of an item to be conditional based on that.  So I took all of the items you see in that preview image and added them to a tablix, then made that conditionally visible based on the following expression –
=ucase(Globals!RenderFormat.Name) <> “IMAGE”   

Now, the report renderer knows to hide that part of the report whenever the renderer is something other than the “IMAGE” output format.  I’ve attached the sample report below so you can try this out yourself.  You can test this in the Power BI service (if you have Premium) by setting up a new e-mail subscription with it, or in Power BI Report Builder by exporting it to a TIFF file.

Download Sample Report

Thanks for reading!

Use Outlook, Microsoft Flow and Paginated Reports to create Power BI Report and Dashboard E-Mail Subscriptions with PDF attachments

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I hear this ask quite a bit these days – I want to be able to create e-mail subscriptions with PDF (or other file format) attachments of my full Power BI report or dashboard.  Well, you can actually do this already, thanks to Microsoft Flow and Paginated Reports in Power BI Premium or SQL Server Reporting Services/Power BI Report Server if you chose to do so.

If you read my blog post last week, I showed you how to use Flow to take your e-mail attachments and save them to a OneDrive for Business folder.  While I did it for PDF’s in that example, you can do it for any attachment type, including images, which is what you get today as an attachment when you subscribe to a Power BI Report or Dashboard.  The challenge is if you want an attachment of a full Power BI report, you only get one report page image per subscription.  However, you can stitch those items together into a paginated report that’s hosted either in Power BI Premium or SSRS and set that up as a subscription with a full report attachment.  Here’s how –

Let’s say I have four report pages total in my Power BI report.  I’ll create four subscriptions, 1 for each page.

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Next, I’m going to create a paginated report where I show each of those images on a different page.  Since they are optimized for landscape, I am going to change my report properties to landscape in Power BI Report Builder.

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With paginated reports, you can surface images one of three ways in your report.  You can do it either as an embedded image, an external image, or from a Database. 

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Embedded images are what I used for the Paginated Report Bear sample report – I literally just saved the image files in the rdl you could download.  That doesn’t help in this use case. 

If I want to use an external images for each of the files, which is a URL image I point to, than I can create a Flow where I save the e-mail attachments from my Power BI subscriptions to a folder in OneDrive (personal), and then use the embed URL from each of those images as external sources for my report.  Each time I save a new image with the same name, my embed URL doesn’t change, so I can update the images as often as I like using Flow and my report will always show the latest.  I just need to add four images to my paginated report, each with a link to one of the report page URLs, and I’m done!

Anyone who cares about security is going bonkers right now, since sticking them in my personal OneDrive means they’re publicly available to anyone in the world.  A better (and safer) solution I’m using is saving them to an Azure SQL database, and then surfacing them as “Database” images in my paginated report.  My flow looks like this for that scenario –

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What I did here was create a table in an Azure SQL database with three fields, and the Attachment field is an Image field.  (This is an admittedly sloppy table written for a blog post vs. production use.)  I also narrowed down the scope of the attachments by limiting the flow to those e-mails from the following address (I could be even more precise, but dinner is waiting in the other room) –

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Now when my Flow is triggered (it checks my inbox every minute), if it finds a new item matching that rule, I see a new entry in my SQL table like so. 

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With them saved to a SQL database, I have a few different options how to surface them in my report.  Either I do them as standalone items with a page break in between (Check out these two pages when I export out the report out to Word) –

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With this method, I’m setting my SQL query to always show the most recent image for each page of my report.

Or perhaps in a table as a collection showing different report states over time if I want to show all the report images

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Now, with my images saved in a paginated report, I can load it to either the Power BI service OR SQL Server Reporting Services, setup my subscription, choose the output format (PDF, Word, etc.) and there you have it – full report attachments of my Power BI reports sent as e-mail subscriptions!

Thanks for reading!