Understanding the Technical Aspects of Paginated Reports
Pagination is synonymous with paging, which is generally defined as dividing documents into individual pages, whether they are printed pages or electronic pages. The term pagination originated in reference to producing books with consecutive page numbering on both sides of a page to designate the correct placement of the pages.
Interestingly enough, the practice of pagination wasn't adopted until around the mid-16 century, replacing foliation which only involved numbering the front sides of book pages (also called folium in those days).
Electronic pagination most likely originated with the advent of desktop publishing in the 1970s with Xerox PARC. Technologies such as desktop publishing, digital typesetting, and word processing feature specialized algorithms used to flow the content through to determine the pagination.
Microsoft Power BI Paginated Reports takes the idea of pagination to a whole other level by turning utterly unrelated data sources into intelligible, visually immersive interactive reports and dashboards. In turn, an organization's raw data is transformed into tangible insights.
Paginated reports in Microsoft Power BI are rooted in the Report Definition Language (RDL) which is an Extensible Markup Language (XML) application generally used with the SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). SSRS is a server-based report generating software system that is part of Microsoft SQL Server services which include SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) and SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS).
SQL Reports Equals Paginated Reports
SSRS provides a graphical interface within Microsoft Visual Studio, allowing developers and SQL admins the ability to connect with SQL databases. Using the tools within SSRS, they're able to format elaborate SQL reports using various techniques.
For less technical users, SSRS offers a Report Builder tool that can be used to format less complex SQL reports. In Power BI, these SQL reports are defined as paginated reports.
How Power BI Revolutionizes Paginated Reports
With Microsoft Power BI Paginated Reports, it allows one the capability to effortlessly combine data sources, visualize that data, and distribute the reports to anyone and everyone within their team or organization. Whether that data source is Excel spreadsheets, on-premise or in the cloud, Power BI provides organizations with the power to connect to popular applications and services—even custom data sources—and examine their data in astonishing detail.
A few of the many benefits of using Power BI include:
Quickly visualize and analyze all of your data in a single location
Use live dashboards with real-time updates to explore all of your data in unbelievable detail
Create, schedule, and automate interactive reports in mere minutes
Various Licensing Options for Paginated Reports in Power BI
To take advantage of paginated reports in Power BI, one must either have a Power BI Pro license that is purchased at the user level or Power BI Premium that is purchased at the organizational level. You also have Power BI Embedded, a Microsoft Azure service that allows independent software vendors (ISVs) and developers to swiftly insert reports, visuals, and dashboards into an application that is achieved via a capacity-based, hourly metered model.
Microsoft Azure and Power BI Embedded
You no longer have to invest the time and money in developing and managing analytics on your own. With Microsoft Azure and Power BI Embedded, you will be able to get to business faster, generate new revenue streams, form differentiated data products and offers, and most importantly impress your customers.
Microsoft Azure and Power BI Embedded allow one to do the following:
- Offer world-class analytics without building them yourself
- Quickly and easily provide customer-facing reports, dashboards, and analytics in your own applications
- Reduce developer resources by automating the monitoring, management, and deployment of analytics
- Gives you full control of Power BI features and intelligent analytics
- Adopt decades of analytics expertise and access the continued investment Microsoft makes in analytics and AI
- Visualize your data with out-of-the-box, certified, and custom-built visuals
- You can easily make decisions from anywhere with visualizations optimized for desktop and mobile
- You can pay as little as $1 per hour for analytics and scale as your enterprise grows with no requirement for end-user licensing
Send Unlimited Reports to Unlimited Users With a Single Power BI License
As you can see, Power BI offers a few licensing options with a wide range of pricing. It goes without saying that with the various price strategies come different product capabilities. Power BI Desktop—the free version—provides all of the dashboards and connections one would need. However, Functions are restricted when it comes to sharing.
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This means you won't be able to collaborate or share reports with others—the entire point behind using paginated reports in Power BI. Besides that, Power Bi Desktop offers you all the features one would expect to find in Power BI Pro. In order to get an example of some expected costs, feel free to use this Power BI calculator.
While Power BI offers a strong business intelligence solution and excellent self-service analytics tools, it lacks a built-in feature allowing administrators and users the ability to schedule and automate reports.
For large organizations, this becomes a significant issue for two primary reasons:
For users to collaborate and access data, one must purchase a license for each user who requires access to the software—whether or not they use it frequently. 
If an organization needs to send reports in specific formats (PowerPoint, PDF, Excel, Word), to specific destinations (Google Drive, Dropbox, FTP, Email, Fax, Printer), or schedule and automate reports to different user groups (customers, vendors, management, C-suite) you won't be able to achieve this with Power BI as a stand-alone application.
While Microsoft online service features scheduling capabilities, there only exist two ways of using it:
To schedule a data refresh so the data is current when users view it online. However, the number of refreshes you can do each day is limited.
To send notifications to users once reports are ready to view. However, as mentioned earlier, each user will need a license to view the reports they receive. For those users only receiving monthly and quarterly reports, a lot of money is wasted maintaining licenses for these individuals.
PBRS for Power BI supports the following formats:
- HTML
- JPG
- PNG
- PowerPoint
- Word
- CSV
- Excel
PBRS for Power BI supports the following destinations:
- Folder
- Printer
- Fax
- FTP
- Slack
- SharePoint
- Dropbox
- Google Drive
You can do all of the above with only one Power BI license. Not only that but PBRS for Power BI allows you to send automated and scheduled paginated reports to thousands and even tens of thousands of people. This will save an organization thousands and tens of thousands of dollars in Power BI licensing costs.
If your organization is big on security, PBRS is an on-premise solution that enables you to be totally in charge of the environment it runs on. This means you can enjoy all the functionality provided by paginated reports in Power BI without all the security concerns. To learn more about Power BI Paginated Reports and tools such as PBRS for Power BI contact one of the knowledgeable experts at ChristianSteven Software for more information.
Arvind Periyasamy
"PBRS - Reports Scheduling System from ChristianSteven, is a very well thought out product which really kept novice end-user in mind to create report schedules. It handles most of the report scheduling requirements out of the box. The system handles both SQL Reporting Services & Power BI in a single solution which fits for our current and future needs.
The support team is very easy to reach, and very professional. Product updates & patches are released every month, covering enhancement requests that they received from customers, which is nice!"
BI Architect, Uline
