- Yooo! What's up? This is Patrick from Guy in a Cube, and in this video I wanna introduce everyone to Paginated reports, and I wanna talk about why you
should use Paginated reports instead of Power BI reports, stay tuned. (Patrick beatboxing) (upbeat music) If you're finding this
for the very first time, be sure to hit that subscribe button to stay up to date from all the videos from both Adam and this guy. Believe me or not, Paginated reports have
been out for many years, with SQL Server Reporting
Services released a long time ago. And a lot of people never used SQL Server Reporting Services, then we introduced this
Power BI report server, and people use it just
for Power BI reports, and they didn't use it
for Paginated reports. And now, Microsoft is
releasing premium per user, which exposes Paginated reports to a whole new group of people. I know, I know, you could
have done it in premium, but premium is too expensive
for a lot of people, but premium per user, I think, is gonna be a little more affordable, and it's gonna have a new user base, a new group of developers and designers of these Paginated reports. And I decided to do a
video to kinda level set, and makes you guys know when
to use a Paginated report compared to a Power BI report, okay? So instead of all this talking, you guys know what I like
to do, let's do what? Let's head over to my laptop. To get started with Paginated reports, you need a design environment, and just like Power BI Desktop, Paginated reports has
Power BI Report Builder. If you do a quick internet search for Power BI Report Builder, download power BI Report Builder,
you'll land on this page, and you click download to
download the Report Builder. If you're signed into
your Power BI Tenant, you can click on the little
down arrow right here and then download Power BI Report Builder. Either way, it'll bring
you to the same place. Once you have it, go ahead and launch it, and then sign into your
Power BI, all right? Sign in using your Power BI
credentials to get signed in. Then you start designing your report. If you've never designed
Paginated reports, it can be a little... It's not as easy as
Power BI reports, right? Power BI reports you're
just dragging and dropping, and things just appearing on the canvas, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, don't work like that
with Paginated reports. You can use wizards and stuff
inside of Paginated reports, and I'll show you that when
I get back to my laptop. But if you've never done this before, Laura Graham Brown has a YouTube channel where she's doing like a 12
days of Paginated Reports, you should check that out. Chris Finlan has great videos on Paginated reports
on his YouTube channel. We have some videos on Paginated reports on Guy in a Cube YouTube channel, and there is a "Paginated
Report in a Day Course" that you download and walk through, all these things will get you up to speed on how to design Paginated reports. So what you wanna do
after you get signed in, you right click on 'Data Sources', and you add your data source. You can use a data set that's
published out to Power BI, or you can use your own data source. You'll click on that data source, you'll see there's SQL
Server, Common Data Service, SQL Database, Oracle, you can just enter data, okay? Once you have your data
source, you right click on it, and then you create a dataset, and you can see I have a few datasets that I've created right here. Once you do that, then you
start designing your report. If you click on 'Insert' in the ribbon, you can say 'insert a
table', 'insert a matrix', 'lists', 'map', 'charts', lots
of different types of charts, and gauges, and spark
lines, and indicators, all types of things here. What's great about this is, Microsoft introducing some things that you can do conditionally
with certain elements on the Power BI report. With Paginated reports, you have access to almost every pixel of that particular report, every bar on the chart,
every line on the graph, every element cell in a table, you have access to all of
these via a 'Properties' window that you can open up. And so like if I click
on this table right here, and I go to 'View' and
choose 'Properties', it'll open up this 'Properties' window, and man, I can get myself in trouble here, you really can get yourself in trouble. But you can walk through
designing your reports, controlling visibility, controlling color, just controlling, expanding, collapsing, all types of things here. You can do row groups and column groups, just a phenomenal breadth of
things that's available to you when you're designing your reports. If you get stuck, right? And it's not laid out how
you want it to lay out, put it in a rectangle,
and it'll probably fix it. If it's already in a rectangle,
take it out of a rectangle, 'cause it's either gonna
help the formatting or hurt the formatting, so you use rectangles or don't use them, just you gotta test it out. If you get stuck more, there's a website, I think is a get report
that you can go to, and all the information
that I'm talking about, Laura Graham's blog, Chris Finlan's blog, the Paginated reports, and the report samples that
I'm about to talk about, links to all those are
where? In the comments below. And you can download them, right? So if you wanna go get
some really neat examples of like invoicing, and
transcripts, and labels, you can go and download that from the link that we'll post below, and it'll give you some ideas on how to create your own reports. And what's great about these is, they use the 'Enter data'
choice as the data source, so you don't have to
worry about connecting to some external data source, you can just open them up, run them, test them out, kick the
tires, look at the design, and even copy some of the design
for your own reports, okay? So it's easy, once you're
done designing your report, then you publish it. So you can either save it locally, you can say 'Save' if you need
to continue to work on it. If you wanna publish it to Power BI, you choose 'File Save As' and
choose the Power BI service. When you click the service, it'll show you all the
workspaces available, you need to publish this out to a workspace that's backed
by premium or premium per user. So you click here, and I already
have this report deployed, and you click 'Save' and
it'll publish that report out. Once the report is published out, you head over to Power BI,
let's go to that workspace, and then go to 'Find Your Report', you'll see how it's... The icon is a little different, right? This is your Paginated report, click on the ellipses
here and choose 'Setting', 'Manage', not 'Settings', choose 'Manage', and then if your data is
coming from On Premises, you'll need to choose a gateway, On Premises or not, you gotta
provide the credentials, unless you use the 'Enter Data' option, then the data is just contained within the report, all right? Once you do all that, you can just simply go
here and run your report, once I run my report, if you have parameters
that you need to specify, it's gonna prompt you to
enter those parameters, and then you just run your report, we'll come back to this in a little bit. Another way to actually get an RDL file, if you go back into your workspace and go to a dataset and
hover over the ellipsis, you'll see an option
here to download the RDL. What'll happen there is
it'll download an RDL with a connection already
established to that dataset, as that'll be the data source, that data set will be the
data source for that report, and then you can create data
sets based on that data source. So now you have your report
out and you're ready to go, but you're probably still thinking, "Why can't I use Power BI reports? Why wouldn't I just use Power BI reports? So it is easy drag and
drop, drag and drop, boom, boom, boom, boom, there's my bar graph, there's my table." But they don't always fit the bill. And so I was working with the customer, yeah, I was working with the customer and they were trying to do something, I was like, "Why not
use a Paginated report?" Let me show you. And so what they done is, they designed this really nice report. And so if you go right here,
choose 'Buying Group Account', this is the report they created, and they created this really nice report, because it's actually pretty nice. And what they did was they
had this buying group, and then they had a location, and then they set their date range, and then what they would do, this is true story, I can't make this up, they would choose an
invoice, choose 'Export', and then export it to PDF, and then they would
choose another invoice, and do the same thing, and
repeat it for every invoice. And I said, "What if you have 10 of these? What if there are 10 invoices?" And they were like, "We do it 10 times." So I was like, "Oh, that
is not efficient at all." And so this was before
the Export API came out and everything like that. And I'm gonna do some videos with Power Automate and the Export API and show you how you can
automate these things, okay? But I'm just, I'm showing
you why you would do this with Paginated reports
instead of Power BI reports. So I said, Don't do this, don't do this, this is not something you wanna do. If you wanna really do this, you would use a Paginated report." And so watch, if I go here and
open up my Paginated report, have the exact same prompts, in fact I'm connecting to
the exact same dataset. And so I choose my location, I mean, I choose my buying group, I choose my location, I
click 'View My Report'. And what you're gonna see here is because I set up the grouping on each one of the invoices
when I designed my report, and I said, "Give me a page
break after each invoice." And so now this is one invoice, there's another invoice on another page, and there's another
invoice on another page. And then if I click 'Export', it'll give me a single PDF file, and instead of attaching
three PDF files to the email, I'll just attach a single PDF file, and then I can send
that off to my customer, I don't have to do it for each
invoice that my customer has, I can do it a single time. And you're probably thinking, "Patrick, but can I automate this?" Yes, like I said earlier,
I'm gonna do a video, I'll show you how you can
couple Power Automate up to do this in an automated fashion, so stay tuned for that video, it's coming out in the
very, very near future. But this is just a typical example, right? This is a reason, or why you
would use Paginated reports instead of Power BI reports. Think about transcripts, or report cards, or
labels, in invoices, right? it's easy to do this
with Paginated reports instead of trying to
do this manual process with Power BI reports. All right, what do you guys think? You got any questions,
you got any comments on using Paginated reports? I love to know, let's continue the conversation, where? In the comments below. If it's your first time visiting
the Guy in a Cube channel, hit that subscribe button. If you like my video,
give me a big thumbs up. As always from Adam and
myself, thanks for watching, see you in the next video.
