Can Power BI Desktop support pagination...

[Anonymous]

Hi,

I heard pagination is supported but when I did some google queries it seemed only if you used a different tool or service rather than Power BI Desktop + Power BI. Is that true? If not can someone point to an example or blog about how to use Power BI Desktop plus Power BI Pro? Seems like it should be part of one of the data visualizations. We do not want to invest in another tool or service for this capability.

Thanks!

[Anonymous]

You need Power BI Report Builder and it's free from Microsoft. 
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=58158

From your Power BI workspace, you will click on New --> Paginated Report
This will trigger Report Builder to open.

This guy does a good job going through the steps to create a simple report that paged (pagination)

[PaulDBrown]

@Anonymous 

Reading the following, it sounds like you are indeed looking for Power BI Report Services:

7 Things to know paginated reports Power BI 

[PaulDBrown]

@Anonymous 

Can you please define what you mean by "pagination"?

Lets see if this helps with regards your other questions...

Power BI desktop: is the free app to develop Power BI solutions and works on PCs. You can import datasets from different sources, transform the data imported in Power Query, and load to the BI model. You can establish relationships between different elements (tables), create calculations (measures) and design visuals to represent graphic representations of your data or KPIS to help users explore data and find insights. Just as a very simplistic simile, it is a tool such as excel to work with data. Basically it has the functionality to create a "full" BI solution.

Power BI service: once you have finished deisgning your BI model/solution, you can upload it to the service to access the solution online, be it on a web browser, tablet or phone. You need an account to do this. The basic service is free. You can only share your solutions with a free account if you publish the report online, and this means it is accessible to the whole WWW, or you can distribute the PBIX file to other users. There are absolutely no restrictions or security filters available.

Power BI Pro: if you wish to share your solution with others (within your organisation or elsewhere) in a secure environment (ie. you control who can access the report and what they can see within), you need a Pro account, which isn't free.

does this help?

[Anonymous]

Hi,

Pagination is when you have too much data from say a table to fit on a single page so the table is spread over multiple pages.  This is a critical capabiliy in finance where they want to print reports where the data will not fit on a single page. In 2018 Microsoft introduced this as a new online tool (Power BI Report Builder) to  handle tabular reports and said Power BI Desktop was for Analytical Reports (Charts, graphs ect) and Power BI Premium. I think/hope that is available in the Power BI Desktop and Power BI Pro combination.

The report pagination capablity has been aound for decades in other reporting solutions.

I hope that helps.

[PaulDBrown]

@Anonymous 

Trying to help here, but I'm not sure if I quite get what your are asking. "Pagination" around here generally refers to a layout/characteristic available in Power BI Report Services (might be worth Binging/Googling it), and I would define it as a "cousin" to Power BI. 
You are right when you say Power BI is intended for "analytical" reports, in that it excels at visual representation of data (graphs, tables, cards, kpis etc). 
I would not describe it as a multi-page report printing resource, if that is what you are asking. You can have a long table/matrix on a page and scroll down using the slider, and print it, but the ultimate goal is visual representation.

At least that is my understanding, though I'm obviously happy to be corrected if my understanding is incorrect.

[Anonymous]

Hi Paul,

First thanks for your time I really appreciate it. When you say print a table/matrix what do you mean? Are you saying scroll down and take a snapshot using the PDF or the the print screen on our PC's?

In regards to visual the folks I work with on the Financial size I am trying to get a better idea of their intent for when they say print to PDF. I am assuming if they have 5 pages of data in a Table/Matrix they want to print out all five pages not a screen shot of one page. I have filters that are in slicers and the pdf shows them which is nice but may have to put their settings in a table/matrix along with the data but not sure if that is possible.

Best Regards,

-Tony

[PaulDBrown]

@Anonymous 

Sorry, I think my reply was ambiguous. What I meant is that you can obviously scroll down the matrix visual. However if you use the print to PDF feature it will only print the data on screen (ie no full set of data contained within the matrix). The only way I know of doing that is to export the matrix to excel and take it from there (very cumbersome and not a real solution for weekly reporting etc, unless there is some magic Power Automate can perform of which I know even less about!)

I believe that Power BI Report Server, which is a different product and requires different licensing structure, does however cover the printing of long reports/sets of data ( I know very little about it, but found the link I posted previously fairly clarifying with regards to what it does printing-wise).

Sorry, I can't be of much further help on resolving your plight...

[Anonymous]

Hi Paul,

No problem. I will be asking Microsoft next through our account manager. I am curious anyway if we can use somehow Power BI Report Builder with Power BI Pro in our Microsoft tenant or if Microsoft is going to provide that capability in Power BI Desktop client.

Again, Many Thanks!

[Anonymous]

Good points but to me visual is not just online it is also representation on printed material. If you work in the financial industry not uncommon for reports that on paper may be quite long where the data in a table may span years or even decades.

When I was developer pagination meant online on a web page you may have a scrollbar on a web page for a table that as you scroll when you reach the 40th record it would pull the next set of 40 records from the server (either cache or direct hit against the database).This was due to performance concerns of say putting 10k worth of records in the browser.