4F. Create paginated reports Flashcards
What are paginated reports and what are their use cases?
- Paginated reports allow report developers to create Power BI artifacts that have tightly controlled rendering requirements. You have total control of how the report renders. If you want a footer on every sales receipt that you create, a paginated report is the appropriate solution. If you want a certain customer’s name to always appear in green font on a report, you can do that in a paginated report.
- Paginated reports are ideal for creating sales invoices, receipts, purchase orders, and tabular data.
- You can use paginated reports when you expect to print the report on paper or when you want an e-receipt, a purchase order, or an invoice.
- Paginated reports also render tabular data exceedingly well.
- You can have customized sort orders, clickable-headers, and URLs in results, which allows for simple integration with custom applications.
- Power BI paginated reports can also display all of your data in a single report element, such as a table. If you have 25,000 records, and you want the reports to print over 100 pages, you can do that. If you want every third record to be printed with a light pink background, you can do that as well.
Where do you create paginated reports?
Power BI paginated reports are not created in Power BI Desktop; they are built by using Power BI Report Builder. You can share paginated reports with either a Power BI Pro or a Power BI premium license.
How do you get data for a paginated report?
- Getting data in a Power BI paginated report does not involve data cleaning steps. In fact, data is not stored in a Power BI paginated report dataset. When data is refreshed on the report, it is retrieved in an unaltered form from the data source, according to the query that was used to retrieve it.
- Each source must be used for a different purpose. For instance, data from an Excel source can be used for a chart, while data from SQL Server can be used for a table on a single report.
- Power BI paginated reports can use a dataset from Power BI service. These datasets have used Power Query to clean and alter the data. The difference is that this work was done in Power BI Desktop or SQL Server Data Tools prior to using Power BI Report Builder, which doesn’t have that tool in the user interface.
How do you publish a paginated report?
To publish your report, select File > Save as and then select Power BI Service. Your report will now appear in Power BI service.
What are some good general questions to ask when creating a paginated report to make sure it is useful?
- What purpose is this report for?
- Who is using the report?
- How can I help people do a better job?
- What is the most important information and how can I highlight it?
- Is this report readable?
- Can people change the elements that they need to if their questions change?
- Do I have visuals that are distracting from the core message of the report?
- Is this report staying focused in a single topic or only a few topics?
- Am I providing all information that the user expects to see in the report?
What are some good practices for creating easy-to-use paginated reports?
- Creating good headers and footers is an excellent way to help the user interpret the report.
- You can provide guidance to the user by documenting why this report was created.
- Adding a report implementation date and time is an excellent practice.
- Target the report for your appropriate region.
What should you think about when formatting a paginated repor?
- Does the user want the report sent to them in an email message?
- Does the user want the report in a printable format?
- Does the user read the report in a web browser?
- Pay attention to the height and width of the report page. Verify that the report isn’t running off the page when the report renders for the user.
What technology has Power BI paginated reports evolved from?
SQL Server Reporting Services
