By far the most exciting announcement for me this week was the new release of Power BI Report Builder that has Power Query built in, allowing you to connect to far more data sources in paginated reports than you ever could before. There’s a very detailed blog post and video showing you how this new functionality works here:
The main justification for building this feature was to allow customer to build paginated reports on sources like Snowflake or BigQuery, something which had only been possible before if you used an ODBC connection via a gateway or built a semantic model in between – neither of which are an ideal solution. However it also opens up a lot of other possibilities too.
For example, you can now build paginated reports on web services (with some limitations). I frequently get asked about building regular Power BI reports that get data from web services on demand – something which isn’t possible, as I explained here. To test using paginated reports on a web service I registered for Transport for London’s APIs and built a simple report on top of their Journey Planner API (Transport for London are the organisation that manages public transport in London). This report allows you to enter a journey starting point and ending point anywhere in or around London, calls the API and returns a table with different routes from the start to the destination, along with timings and instructions for each route. Here’s the report showing different routes for a journey from 10 Downing Street in London to Buckingham Palace:
You can also build paginated reports that connect to Excel workbooks that are stored in OneDrive or OneLake, meaning that changes made in the Excel workbook show up in the report as soon as the workbook is saved and closed:
So. Much. Fun. I’ll probably develop a presentation for user groups explaining how I built these reports soon.
And yes, if you need to export data to Excel on a schedule, paginated reports are now an even better choice. You know your users want this.
