What is report bursting in Power BI? Why is it important?
In Power BI, 'report bursting' refers to the process of running a single report, filtering it for different recipients (e.g., by region, manager or department), and automatically distributing those personalized versions. BI Helper is a SaaS application that automates report bursting in Power BI.
Businesses routinely need to send reports to their stakeholders. Automated report bursting enables consistent and reliable business engagement and allows business intelligence and reporting teams to focus on analysis and insights rather than repetitive manual tasks.
Does Power BI offer any automated report bursting options?
Power BI offers two methods to automate report bursting and deliver user-specific PDF or Power Point files to users - Subscribe to email and by using Power Automate.
This article covers report bursting using Power Automate and compares it with BI Helper. For a comparison of Power BI - Subscribe to email with BI Helper, see this article.
Power Automate is a workflow automation tool from Microsoft. It can be used to set up a workflow to export and distribute Power BI reports in PDF, Power Point, Excel and other formats.
Prerequisite: At least one workspace in the Power BI tenant needs to be backed by a reserved capacity in Power BI Premium to enable access to the 'Export to File' API for Power BI Reports.
Workflow Automation Steps (Summary)
1. Flow: Sign in to Power Automate and create a scheduled cloud flow.
2. Schedule: Select a start date and time for your flow and define its schedule, e.g., Every Monday at 8 AM.
3. Filter values and recipients list: Create your list of slicer/ filter values in Excel, SharePoint or SQL and use the 'Get Rows' action to fetch them into Power Automate.
4. Search for Power BI and select Export to File for Power BI Reports.
5. Loop (Apply to Each): For every person in the list:
Region eq 'North').
The Power BI Premium capacity required to use Power Automate for report bursting starts at $4,995 per month. This makes it unaffordable for small and medium enterprises.
Every report recipient needs a Power BI Pro ($14 per month per user) or Premium Per User ($24) license.
Before every report run, the filter values and recipients list needs to be manually updated. This is a tedious manual process, which is a waste of time for highly skilled members of the analytics and reporting teams.
For detailed instructions on using Power Automate to generate and email PDF reports from Power BI, see this Microsoft Learn article.
BI Helper is a browser-based application which generates and distributes PDF and Power Point reports from Power BI. It is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant and supports scheduled and on-demand report delivery.
BI Helper is integrated with Power BI and delivers multi-page PDF/ PPTX files as email attachments to internal and external users. Report recipients do not need Power BI licenses, making it highly cost-effective. The report sender needs one Power BI Pro license at $14 per month, and a BI Helper plan starting at $50 per month. There is no restriction on the number of recipients.
BI Helper is easy to use, and scales from a handful of reports to enterprise volumes of 1,000 PDF/ PPTX per hour. Advanced features include email authentication, secure access, automated filter input and workflow automation.
In the BI Helper Standard plan, filter values and recipient email IDs can be uploaded to BI Helper in an Excel file, making the process fast and error-free. See this tutorial for details of manual filter and slicer input.
In the Premium and Enterprise plans, BI Helper offers automated filter and slicer input, where it reads the latest values and email IDs directly from power BI before every job run. With a one-time job set up and no manual input, BI Helper automatically creates and emails filtered, user-specific PDF/ PPTX reports per the defined job schedule. This is a very popular feature, used by over 50% of all PDF/ PPTX reports generated in BI Helper. See this tutorial for details of automated filter and slicer input.
Given the costs involved, Power Automate based report bursting is not feasible for small and medium enterprises, while BI Helper scales easily from very small to enterprise reporting volumes.
Despite its high cost, Power Automate report bursting offers lower flexibility and features than BI Helper, which is secure, easy to use and cost-effective.
Finally, BI Helper addresses a huge need gap by delivering filtered user-specific PDF and Power Point reports to external users with no licensing costs or maintenance overhead.
Learn more about BI Helper and sign up for your 7-day free trial!
