Power BI is renowned for its strong visualization features, including dashboards and standard reports. Depending on your needs and the size of your activities, the service also provides you with various licensing kinds. However, you’ll need an additional tool, available in Power BI Premium, to design and publish paginated reports. Power BI Report Builder is the name of it. This article will contrast the two Power BI report types and provide an overview of paginated reports’ benefits.
What’s Power BI and Paginated Reporting?
You can group, filter, and sort data for paginated reports using Power BI Report Builder. You can also add formulas and expressions to the reports. You can modify and alter reports made with the SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) Report Designer using Power BI Report Builder.
You may generate free-form reports for anything else, column-based reports for summary data, chart reports for graph-based data, and paginated reports for matrix reports using Power BI Report Builder. Other charts and reports, lists, pictures, and controls for dynamic web-based applications can also be found in the information.
You may add various interactive features to your reports with Power BI Report Builder, including gauges, charts, sparklines, indicators, and drill-through links. On the contrary, Paginated reports typically consist of numerous pages, each precisely set out. Every invoice has only one page, with repeated headers and footers.
When diving into the intricacies of report generation, especially when aiming for precision in layout across multiple pages, the Power BI Paginated reporting guide will provide a comprehensive look into producing various reports—from column-based summaries to intricate matrix reports—all while utilizing the interactive features of Power BI Report Builder.
How do they differ from each other?
Deciding between standard Power BI reports and paginated reports can be challenging. It frequently depends on your specific wants and requirements at any given time. If a Power BI report contains numerous tables, that is a drawback. To view the complete report, you must navigate numerous pages.
Additionally, a Power BI report that you print will only include the now visible information. On the other hand, Power BI Report Builder will print paginated reports of all of the content. It will also instantly generate whichever many pages are necessary to display all the data contained within them.
To summarize, paginated reports offer a quicker and more automated procedure than standard Power BI reports, which call for manually creating individual pages to contain visualizations like charts and graphs.
In addition to many use cases, you can check out Power BI Report Builder examples that are relevant to your business. For instance, a sales team would benefit most from a Power BI report. To monitor how the statistics vary over time, other salespeople might enter the data into the same report for their particular market, sector, or client.
Data Exploration and Interactivity
Paginated reports lack the idea of a data model and are only compatible with sources of structured data. They work well in situations where the data is straightforward and basic modeling is not necessary. Power BI Reports, on the other hand, support a wide range of data sources, including both structured and unstructured data.
Additionally, they use Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) to provide strong data modeling capabilities. And last, if you’re searching for ideal circumstances with intricate data interactions and calculations, Power BI Reports are preferable.
Design and Layout
Paginated reports via Power BI provide pixel-perfect printing, guaranteeing that every piece of information in a table is accurately portrayed on paper. They are perfect in situations when clear and organized data display is required. Therefore, paginated Reports are ideal for stable data sources and situations where printing hard copies of reports is necessary.
In contrast, Power BI Reports are optimized for data exploration and interactive visualizations. They give on-screen data analysis capabilities more weight than printing options. And they work best when combined with interactive dashboards for dynamic data discovery and insights.
Accessibility and Export Options
Report Definition Language (RDL) files are used to save paginated reports. Their files contain information about the report’s organization and data presentation. Additionally, they deployed to a Power BI Report Server in the cloud or an on-premises reporting server.
Therefore, they work best for businesses that need on-premises data security and reporting. PBIX files, which include the report’s structure and underlying data model, are used to preserve Power BI reports. Additionally, they may be shared via the Power BI Report Server or published to the Power BI service, which enables cloud-based collaboration with stakeholders.
Which one to choose for your in-depth analysis?
The bottom line is that both of these tools offer a wide range of capabilities and may be used to create some report types, but one is more appropriate than the other for particular tasks. Ensure you use the appropriate reporting tool for the job before pushing any tool to its limits. It would help if you also considered combining Power BI interactive reports and Paginated Reports to satisfy your analytic and operational reporting needs.
