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Power BI Report Builder

Scenario:
Power BI Report Builder is a standalone tool whose main function is to create paginated reports for Power BI Service as well as Power BI Report Server. However, due to the scarcity of its main role, there are not many users, and it is difficult to find the introduction of its basic functions on the Internet.

 

1.Difference between Power BI Report Builder and Microsoft Report Builder:

Power BI Report Builder is optimized for RDL reports in the Power BI Service, which can log into Power BI, allows you to open and save reports from the workspace, and supports querying Power BI advanced datasets and datasets of non-advanced users that have been published to the Service. And you could refer the below picture to learn details.

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2. Paginated Report
Power BI Report Builder is for paginated reports, so what is a paginated report? What is the difference with normal reports created with Power BI? Paged reports are designed to be printed and shared because they are formatted to fit nicely on a page, so they are called paged. Even if a table spans multiple pages, it displays all the data in that table. For example, in Power BI Service, there are two reports, one created by Power BI Desktop with the file extension pbix, and the other is a paged report created by Power BI Report Builder with the file extension rdl. If both reports have the same visual effect of sliders, Power BI Desktop created reports, when printed or exported to PDF, only part of the data can be displayed and printed out, only those lines you see on the page. Whereas putting the same table in a paged report, when you print him or export to PDF, it will show all the data.
Report created by Power BI Desktop export as pdf(the slider not work).

 

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Paginated Report export:

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3.Basic features of Power BI Report Builder
I will introduce the basic features of Power BI Report Builder based on its interface:
File:
We could create a new paginated report through New, and open recent documents through Recent Documents.
We could choose Open to open paginated report from local PC or Power BI Service.
We could save our paginated report through Save and Save as.
We could use publish to publish our paginated report to our workspace.

 

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Home:
The operation bar under Home is mainly for adjusting the table content, which is very close to Microsoft word and excel, based on the interface display, we can see that it consists of views, clipboard, font, paragraph, border, number, layout, share. When we click on run, we can get the specific performance of our paging report, clipboard,font,paragraph,border,number,layout is very close to what we can do in word and excel, and then we can check the result after run to feel the charm of the function. And we can also publish the report to Power BI Service under Home.

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Data:
Data shows the data sources supported by the tool, in fact, the data sources supported by the creation of paging reports. It is similar to the Get data operation in Power BI.

 

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Insert:
The operation under Insert is also similar to adding visual effects in Power BI, but as you can see below, there are not many visual effects supported by paging reports, only some simple and basic ones.

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View:
The parameters shown below the view, when we check them, will be displayed on the interface. Here it is necessary to mention that in Power BI Report Builder, after the parameters are configured, the function is similar to the slicer in Power BI, which can be used to filter paginated reports.

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This article is only a brief introduction to Power BI Report Builder, but as a tool, to be proficient, you still need to rely on your own continuous exploration, in-depth research, and repeated operations, I hope this article can help users who are new to Power BI Report Builder.

 

Author: Lucien Wang

Reviewer: Kerry & Ula