How Do You Send Power BI Reports to a Distribution List?

Imagine preparing the operations report for Monday’s meeting. You have the PDF ready, but before sending it you open last week’s email to check the names. A new manager needs a copy. A colleague has left. Someone else wants their deputy included while they are away.

Your team calls it the distribution list, but it may not be a single address in Outlook. It might be a column in an Excel workbook, a list of active managers in your business database or a small contact group you maintain yourself. The report is only part of the weekly job; keeping the audience right is the other part.

PBRS lets you bring that list into the delivery. If your mail administrator already maintains a group address, PBRS can send the report there. If the addresses live in a database or file, you can use that source instead of copying them into another email each week.

For the operations team, the aim is simple: the people attending Monday’s meeting should have the current report, and you should not have to rebuild the recipient list every Friday to make that happen.

If everyone is already in an email group, keep that arrangement. Add the group address to the PBRS Email destination and let your mail system look after its members. When the group owner adds the new manager, future messages to that address include them without changing the report schedule.

You can also keep contacts and groups in the PBRS Address Book. That is useful when the reporting team owns a small, shared set of recipients. Select the contacts or group when setting up the email, rather than typing the same addresses into every job. Outlook address-book contacts and groups are another option when PBRS is configured to use MAPI.

When the names come from your database

Suppose your operations database already records each manager’s email address, site and whether they are still active. PBRS can use a query to retrieve the people who should receive the weekly report. You choose the records you want, rather than maintaining a separate mailing list alongside information the business already keeps current.

For our Monday meeting, the query might select the active operations managers. A new manager starts receiving the report once their record meets those rules. A departing manager stops appearing when the record is updated. The accuracy of the email list follows the accuracy of that source.

When the list is in Excel

Your coordinator may prefer a workbook with a row for each manager. You can still use that list, but first decide how PBRS will read it. One route is to make the workbook available through an appropriate Excel ODBC connection and use PBRS’s database-source controls to query the addresses. Another is to export the email column to the plain-text mailing-list format PBRS accepts.

With the text-file route, keep one email address on each line, without a heading or separators. Save the file somewhere PBRS can read it. If the coordinator changes the workbook, the text copy must be refreshed too; saving the spreadsheet alone does not update a separate exported file.

The workbook route needs the right driver and access on the PBRS machine. Your technical colleague can set that up once, then test that the scheduled job can read the saved list while the coordinator is logged out.

What about a native Power BI subscription?

If your team only needs a simple report notification, a Power BI subscription may already do the job. PBRS is worth considering when the work also includes reading the current recipient list, preparing attachments or giving different people different files. It can send exported documents through your configured mail account, and recipients do not need Power BI licenses to open those files.

Begin with the operations report and a small test list. Choose people who can check the attachment with you before it becomes part of the whole team’s Monday routine.

Create the PBRS schedule, select the report and choose the week and pages the team discusses. Add an Email destination and select the recipient source from the To, CC or BCC controls. You can type a group address, choose address-book contacts, build a database query or select a text-file list.

For a database or connected workbook, inspect the returned addresses before saving. Check a new manager and a departing colleague against the result. For a text file, open the saved file and check the same names. You are checking the list the job will actually use, rather than assuming it matches the coordinator’s latest changes.

The PBRS Email destination guide explains the recipient controls. Use CC when the team should see who else received the message, or BCC when those addresses should not be displayed to the other recipients. A group address follows your mail system’s own membership and delivery rules.

Give the team a useful meeting pack

Choose PDF for the weekly overview and give the attachment and subject the reporting period. Write the explanation you would normally send: “The operations figures for last week are attached. Please bring any questions about your site to Monday’s meeting.” PBRS supports HTML formatting and Inserts, so the message can stay familiar while the date changes with each run.

If the meeting also needs stock and outstanding-order reports, PBRS can deliver several attachments together or merge the PDF outputs into one document. Excel outputs can be combined into a workbook, and you can save a copy to a folder or SharePoint in the same job. Everyone arrives with the material they need, without you assembling the pack again each week.

When each manager needs their own figures

So far, everyone has received the same operations report. Now the site managers ask for a report showing only their own location. Changing the mailing list will not change the figures inside a shared attachment.

This is where a PBRS data-driven schedule helps. Each row can supply the manager’s address and the site filter, so PBRS prepares the right version for that person. The same row can also supply the greeting, filename, format, password and destination. A manager who wants Excel can receive a workbook while another receives a PDF.

A query that simply returns email addresses fills a recipient list. A data-driven reporting job uses each record to prepare and deliver the corresponding report. Choose the latter when the people on the list should receive different information. The data-driven schedule guide walks through that setup.

Try the list before Monday depends on it

Run the job to the test audience and open the received attachment. Check the week, the pages and who received a copy. Then make a controlled change to the source list and test again. For a connected source, confirm the changed results are read; for an exported text list, refresh that file before testing.

If someone misses the email, start with their address in the source. For a group address, ask the mail administrator to check membership, allowed senders and any held messages. For a database or file, check what PBRS read and whether the background account could reach it. The PBRS execution results and Error Log help you separate a report-generation problem from an email problem.

Also decide what should happen if the query returns no recipients or the source cannot be read. Those are different from a successful report with no business data. Test the response in your installation so a broken list does not quietly become a missing Monday report.

Your operations system may know when the weekly figures and manager records are ready. It can ask PBRS to run the saved report at that point. The reporting team keeps the report and recipient-source setup in PBRS, while the application supplies the request to start.

That avoids turning the application into another place where somebody has to maintain the mailing list. If the job reads a database or connected workbook, check that the latest changes have been saved and can be read by PBRS before requesting the run.

POST /api/Schedule/ExecuteScheduleAsync
Authorization: bearer {pbrsAccessToken}
Content-Type: application/json

{"ScheduleType":"report","uniqueid":101,"RunBy":"Weekly operations"}

GET /api/Schedule/GetExecutionStatus?ExecutionId={ExecutionId}
Authorization: bearer {pbrsAccessToken}

Return to Monday’s meeting. The new manager has the weekly PDF, the departing colleague is no longer on the list, and nobody has asked you to forward another copy. The report and the people receiving it are being looked after in the places your team has agreed to maintain.

Start with one recurring delivery and the list you already use. It may be an email group, a workbook or a query from your business system. Decide whether everyone needs the same document or their own version, then use that example to evaluate PBRS.

The Power BI report automation page explains how the report preparation and delivery fit together. To plan your first list-based delivery, explore PBRS report distribution.
Plan your report distribution