The creation and distribution of user-specific reports by sequentially applying filter or slicer values is called report bursting. With the explosive growth in data-driven decision making, businesses across the world are adopting report bursting to deliver information to customers, vendors and employees. Across industries, the availability of accurate and timely information and insights is now a leading determinant of business success.
This tutorial uses the Retail Sales Report in Power BI to illustrate report bursting in BI Helper. The most important part of this process is to set up filters and slicers in BI Helper.
The detailed steps to configure slicers and filters in BI Helper are given below.
- Create your BI Helper account here.
2. After signing in, BI Helper takes you to the Job Summary tab where you see the Retail Sales Report. This report is the BI Helper demo job. Click on the Edit button (blue pen icon).
3. This takes you to the Schedule Report tab. Verify that the job name is Retail Sales Report. Save and go to the Generate PDF tab.
4. The Generate PDF tab has three sections. In the Account Authorization section, sign in to your Power BI account with your Microsoft credentials and select the Retail Sales Report. Click on Preview Report to confirm that the Retail Sales Report opens in BI Helper.
Next, go to the Apply Slicers, Filters and Email IDs section. Select the Manual input mode. Enter the slicer / filter details in the below table based on the instructions in the sections on:
A. Slicer Configuration
B. Filter Configuration
To generate PDFs without applying filters or slicers, leave the Slicer/ Filter Title and Value columns blank.
Optional: Follow the instructions to customize the name of your output PDF file, and to select table or matrix visuals for Excel export.
A. Slicer Configuration
BI Helper reads slicers from the first page of a Power BI report. Slicers in BI Helper follow the syntax: Slicer Title<>Table Name/Column Name.
BI Helper identifies slicers using the Title field in Visualizations > General in Power BI. It does not read the slicer Header in Power BI.
1. In the Retail Sales Report, the District Manager slicer uses the DM column in the Store table in Power BI. In the BI Helper input table, enter the slicer as District Manager<>Store/DM as seen in the visual below. The slicer values in the second column are the names of the District Managers - Annelie Zubar, Tina Lassila, Andrew Ma.
Important: Slicer title, table name, column name and slicer values are all case-sensitive and have to be entered exactly as they are in the Power BI report.
2. Numeric Slicers: Use the int(12345) format to enter values of numeric slicers in the second column of the input table.
3. Multiple slicers are separated using the pipe operator |. Let's say you have a second slicer with the syntax Product<>Item Master/Product Name, and one of the products is T-Shirt 38045. To apply both slicers, enter the Slicer/ Filter Title in the BI Helper input table as: District Manager<>Store/DM | Product<>Item Master/Product Name
4. Enter the Value in the second column as: Annelie Zubar | T-Shirt 38045
5. Enter the recipient email IDs in the To, CC and BCC columns. Multiple email IDs in a column need to be separated by a semicolon (;).
6. Add a new row in the input table for each slicer combination and set of email recipients.
For automated slicer / filter and email input, see this tutorial.
B. Filter Configuration
BI Helper supports report level filters in the first page of a Power BI report. It does not support page level filters or filters applied to individual visuals.
If your Power BI report uses filters instead of slicers, the steps to set them up in BI Helper are the same except for the way filter names are defined.
1. Filters in BI Helper follow the syntax: Table Name/Column Name. In the visual below, the report level filter (filters on all pages) is Report Month, which is a column in the Dates Master table. In the BI Helper input table, enter the filter as Dates Master/Report Month
Important: Table name, column name and filter values are all case-sensitive and need to be entered exactly as they are in the Power BI report.
2. If your report uses both slicers and filters, you can separate them using the pipe operator | as detailed in the slicer configuration section.
Send Email
1. After entering slicer/ filter titles and values, and TO, CC and BCC in the email recipient columns, save and go to the Send Email tab.
2. Set up and validate your sender mail ID and type in the email subject and body.
3. Click on Update to complete your job setup and return to the Job Summary tab.
In the Job Summary tab, click on the Play button to run the Retail Sales Report. BI Helper will apply the slicer, filter and email values entered in the above steps to create and send PDFs to your end-users.
This illustrates the report bursting process in BI Helper.
