Power BI Paginated Reports – Subscriptions
4 mins read

Power BI Paginated Reports – Subscriptions

Since Microsoft announced that Power BI Paginated Reports was becoming a Power BI Pro feature, I started exploring the available functionality for Power BI Paginated Reports.

As a first step, I tried to “migrate” an example report from SQL Server Reporting Services to Power BI. In a previous blog post, I described the steps required to migrate successfully. You can find that blog post using the following link: Converting SSRS Reports to Power BI Paginated Reports.

In this blog post, I will look at the subscription functionality for Paginated Reports.

Quick Overview

How to create Power BI Paginated Report subscription
Where to find an overview of existing subscriptions?
What about Data-Driven subscriptions?

How to create a Power BI Paginated Report Subscription

To create a subscription for a Power BI Paginated report, we first navigate to the Power BI portal. As a next step, you navigate to your Paginated report and open the report.

Power BI Paginated Report Before Execution

As you can see in the screenshot above, the create subscription button is disabled. You can only create a subscription as soon as you have executed the report. As soon as I have selected values for my Main Product Category and Sub Category parameters, I click the View report button. As a result, my report is executed as shown in the screenshot below.

Power BI Paginated Report After Execution - Create subscription parameter enabled

I selected the Create subscription button, and the Subscribe to emails window is showing on the right. There currently are no subscriptions configured.

I will be creating a subscription now. To get this done, I click the Add new subscription button.

Screenshot from application » 11

As soon as I select the Add new subscription button, the configuration pane for the subscription becomes available.

As a first step, I’m defining the name of my subscription, in my example below I just named it Product Sales Overview Category – Bikes – Maintain Bikes.

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As a next step, I’m choosing the report format, currently, there are 7 formats available. For this report, I’m choosing Microsoft Excel.

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What is important is that the report parameters that you used to execute the paginated report will be used in the subscription as well.

Screenshot from application » 14

As a next step, you can define who needs to receive the report. What is important here is that when you are using Power BI Pro licenses, every receiver will need to have a Pro license.

As soon as you have defined the receiver(s), you can fill in the subject and a subscription message as well.

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Next up is to select the subscription frequency and time when the subscription should be executed. You can choose between Hourly, Daily, Weekly, and Monthly.

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As a last step, you can define if you want to allow a recipient to access the report in Power BI. If you want to include a link to the report in the email and if you want to you can include a preview image as well.

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To finalize, I click the Save and close button.

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Subscription Overview

To get an overview of all existing report subscriptions, I will be navigating to the Settings icon and choosing Settings.

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When the settings screen is loaded, I’m switching to the Subscriptions tab. In this overview, my Product Sales Overview Category – Bikes – Mountain Bikes subscription is showing.

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Data-Driven Subscriptions

Data-Driven subscriptions are not supported as a default functionality. Luckily there are a couple of ways to achieve this. To be fair, I didn’t try it yet so I’m happy to share an external source here. All credits to Alexandru Puiu. A couple of weeks ago, Alexandru Puiu joined a dataMinds.be evening session where he explained how you can set up data-driven subscriptions for Power BI.

You can find the session on YouTube using the following link: 20221221 – Data Driven Subscriptions in Power BI (Alexandru Puiu) – YouTube

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