Power BI Tutorial: Weekly Scheduled Reports to PDF

PBRS is a Power BI reporting solution that allows you to send and schedule unlimited reports to unlimited users with only ONE Power BI license. Want to learn more about PBRS? Get a free trial.

This demo will show you how to schedule & automatically export a single Power BI report to a local folder on your laptop in PDF format. To begin, select 'single' for Power BI. Choose the Power BI account that you want to use as well as the report that you are going to run. In this case it's going to be a sales report. After that you will need to go to the scheduling tab and select your options. For this example we will run the report weekly on Mondays, so we will uncheck the other options. If you want it to run at 7:00 AM like we are doing here, you will simply need to over type what is there and change that to be AM. And that's all the changes you need to make for this particular example, but for more information on other options available, please view the scheduling demo.

Once you are done changing the settings, you need to make sure to click 'next' to save the information. Next, take a look at the report settings tab. If you wish to make any changes to the report or the PDF output, then you can make that here. You simply highlight and make the change. For this example we will accept all the defaults so we will simply click next. This brings you to the report filters tab and for this example the report has a filter of a sales executive, so we will enter that here. Click 'add' to add a report filter, and then you can enter the table name and the column. Keep in mind when adding these details that this information is case sensitive. The field data type for this example is 'string' so we will leave that as it is and then we will enter the sales executive name that we want to run the report for and click add. And then you'll see that the report filter has been saved.

Click next. This brings you to the refresh datasets tab and if you want to refresh the dataset before running the report, you would set that up here. For this example we don't, so we will just click next for now. Next up is the destinations tab. Here we will add a destination that we will send it to, in this case it is a PBRS reports folder. The format we want to use is PDF and we will enable PDF options. We will put in an owner password and then a user password and click 'okay' to save that information. Click next. This is the exception handling. For more information on exception handling, please view the exception handling demo. Click next again. This is our custom task section. For more information on custom tasks, please view the custom task demo. Now we will click finish to save the schedule.

The schedule has now been saved, but we will execute this manually so that you can see the resulting PDF. So just right click and select execute. This will take a few moments. The report has now executed successfully, so let's go and review the folder and you will see the report. Double click it to open it and you will be prompted for the password you set earlier. It really is that simple!