Paginated reports are designed to be printed or shared. They're called paginated because they're formatted to fit well on a page. They display all the data in a table, even if the table spans multiple pages. They're also called pixel perfect because you can control their report page layout exactly. Power BI Report Builder is the standalone tool for authoring paginated reports for the Power BI service.
Paginated reports often have many pages. For example, this report has 563 pages. Each page is laid out exactly, with one page per invoice, and repeating headers and footers. You can preview your report in Report Builder, then publish it to the Power BI service, app.powerbi.com.
Prerequisites
You don't need any license to download Power BI Report Builder from the Microsoft Download Center for free.
You need a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) license to publish a report to the service.
You can publish and share paginated reports in your My Workspace or in other workspaces, as long as the workspace is in a Power BI Premium capacity and you have write access to the workspace.
In a Premium Gen1 capacity, a Power BI admin needs to enable paginated reports in the Premium capacities sectionof the Power BI admin portal. In a Premium Gen2 capacity, paginated reports are enabled automatically.
Compare Power BI reports and paginated reports
A major advantage of paginated reports is their ability to print all the data in a table, no matter how long. Picture that you place a table in a Power BI report. You see some of its rows in the table on the page, and you have a scroll bar to see the rest. If you print that page, or export it to PDF, the only rows that print are the ones you saw on the page.
Now say you place the same table in a paginated report. When you print it or export it to PDF, the paginated report has as many pages as necessary to print every row in that table.
In the following video, Microsoft Most Valued Professional - Data Platform Peter Myers, and Principal Program Manager Chris Finlan demonstrate printing a similar table in the two report formats.
Compare Power BI reports and paginated reports
A major advantage of paginated reports is their ability to print all the data in a table, no matter how long. Picture that you place a table in a Power BI report. You see some of its rows in the table on the page, and you have a scroll bar to see the rest. If you print that page, or export it to PDF, the only rows that print are the ones you saw on the page.
Now say you place the same table in a paginated report. When you print it or export it to PDF, the paginated report has as many pages as necessary to print every row in that table.
In the following video, Microsoft Most Valued Professional - Data Platform Peter Myers, and Principal Program Manager Chris Finlan demonstrate printing a similar table in the two report formats. Report from a variety of data sources
A single paginated report can have a number of different data sources. It doesn't have an underlying data model, unlike Power BI reports. You create embedded data sources and datasets in the paginated report itself. You can't use shared data sources or shared datasets. You create reports in Report Builder on your local computer. If a report connects to on-premises data, after you upload the report to the Power BI service, you need to create a gateway and redirect the data connection. Here are some of the data sources you can connect to:
Azure SQL Database and Azure Synapse Analytics (via Basic and oAuth)
Azure Analysis Services (via SSO)
SQL Server via a gateway
Power BI datasets
Oracle
Teradata
See Supported data sources for Power BI paginated reports for a complete list.
Source: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/
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