BI Helper is a SaaS application that automates the creation and distribution of PDF reports from Power BI. It enables businesses to apply slicers and filters to their Power BI reports, generate user-specific PDFs and share them with customers, employees and vendors.
To use BI Helper, an organization needs to buy just one Power BI Pro or PPU license from Microsoft. No investment is needed in servers, storage or any other IT infrastructure.
BI Helper is designed for business analytics and reporting professionals, and is very easy to use. It greatly increases their productivity and efficiency by eliminating the manual and error-prone task of producing and distributing PDFs. This tutorial explains how to create and share Power BI PDF reports using BI Helper.
Prerequisite: Create the Power BI report which you want to distribute as PDFs to your end-users. Publish it to a designated workspace in Power BI Service.
Tutorial: 5 Easy Steps to Create and Distribute PDFs from Power BI
1. Create your BI Helper account here.
2. After signing in, BI Helper takes you to the Job Summary tab. Click on the Add New Job + button at the top right of the page.
3. This takes you to the Schedule Report tab. Enter the job name and job schedule. Save and go to the Generate PDF tab.
4. The Generate PDF tab has three sections.
4 a. In the Account Authorization section, sign in to your Power BI account with your Microsoft credentials and select the workspace and report that you want to set up ias a BI Helper job. Click on Preview Report to confirm that the it opens in BI Helper.
4 b. Next, go to the Apply Slicers, Filters and Email IDs section. Select the input mode - Manual or Automated.
In the Manual mode, enter the slicer/ filter details and recipient email IDs in the below table based on the instructions in this tutorial.
If you choose the Automated mode for slicer/ filter and email input, refer to this tutorial for instructions.
Scroll down below the table to input the output PDF filename and select table and matrix visuals for Excel export.
To generate PDFs without applying filters or slicers, leave the Slicer/ Filter Title and Value columns blank.
4c. Finally, go to the Advanced section of the Generate PDF tab to set up the output file format (PDF / PPTX), page size, timeout and pages to print. Save and go to the Send Email tab.
5. In the Send Email tab, set up and validate your sender mail ID and type in the email subject and body. 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 your newly created Bi Helper job. BI Helper will apply the entered slicer, filter and email values to create and send PDFs to end-users as email attachments.
Report recipients can be internal (employees, contractors) or external (customers, vendors) to your organization.
They do not need Power BI licenses to receive their reports. All they need is an email ID.
And that is how BI Helper creates and shares PDF reports from Power BI.
