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Including paginated report visuals in a Power BI Desktop report
Not sure whether to choose Report Builder paginated reports for printing or Power BI interactive ones for showing on screen? Now you don't have to choose, as this blog explains.

Posted by Andy Brown on 05 December 2022

In this blog

Creating and publishing paginated reports
Adding a Paginated Report visual to a Power BI report

The paginated report visual

I'm not quite sure when this visual was added! None of us in Wise Owl remember seeing it in any announcement:

This icon has been quietly smuggled into the standard list of visualisations!

Clicking on this allows you to connect to an SSRS or Report Builder style report:

A paginated report viewed in Power BI!

To explain how to do this I've covered the following topics under separate subheadings below:

how to create and publish paginated reports so that they appear in Power BI Service; and
how to then include these reports within a Power BI Desktop report.

Although this is aimed at those who are already used to creating paginated reports in the likes of Reporting Services or Report Builder, my example report is so simple that anyone will be able to follow along!

Creating and publishing paginated reports

You may be a Report Builder or SSRS guru, but you won't be able to use either of these products to publish your reports to the Power BI Service. Instead you need to download the separate Power BI Report Builder application from the Microsoft Store:

This is a free download from the Microsoft Store.

You can then create a report as normal:

This should look very familiar to users of Report Builder!

I added a single parameter called Region to my report:

My report contains two textboxes, one of which displays the value of the Region parameter.

I've avoided including any data sources or datasets because I don't want to get into the complication of setting up a gateway to allow my published report to access the same data as my local one.

I can now save and the publish my report:

This button ISN'T available in standard Report Builder.

I chose to publish to my default Power BI workspace:

I'm calling this report Owly paginated report.

I can now view this published report in Power BI Service:

My paginated report appears in Power BI online just like any other.

Adding a Paginated Report visual to a Power BI report

You can now use the following visual to add a paginated report into Power BI:

Click on this icon to add a paginated report visual.

You can then choose which published paginated report you want to connect to:

Click on this button to choose a report to which you want to connect.

Before you choose a report, however, you should first equip your report with parameter values:

Here I'm dragging a measure called Region to use onto the report's Parameters section in the field well.

Here's the measure I'm using:

This measure picks up on the value of the currently selected region in any visual, filter or slicer.

You can now choose to which published report you want to connect, then choose which values you want to map onto any parameters that it expects:

Having selected a published report to connect to, click on the Set Parameters button to set parameters for your paginated report.

Choose which parameters in your Power BI Desktop report you want to map onto which parameters in your published paginated report:

Note that you will only be able to do this once you've assigned parameters to this report visual in Power BI Desktop, as explained above.

You can now view your report!

You can choose to export your report, as here, or click on the Open report button to view it in Power BI Service.

Kudos to Microsoft for going to such lengths to support what from their point of view must seem like a bit of old-fashioned backward compatiblilty.

Some other pages relevant to the above blog include:

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