For filtered, per recipient delivery of PDF and PowerPoint files from Power BI without Premium or Fabric capacity, third-party automation is the solution.
BI Helper a leading Power BI report automation tool. It is secure, cost-effective and easy-to-use. It is regularly used by over 200 companies in 30 countries to automate report distribution to both internal and external recipients such as employees, customers and vendors.
What is report bursting? Why is it important?
Report bursting is the process of running a single report, filtering it for different recipients (e.g., by region, manager or department) and distributing the filtered reports to the respective users.
Automated reporting helps businesses build consistent and reliable engagement with their customers, vendors and employees. It takes away the repetitive manual task of report generation, enabling business intelligence and reporting teams to focus on data analysis and insights.
Does Power BI offer any automated report bursting options?
Power BI offers two methods to automate the delivery of user-specific PDF or PowerPoint files to users: Subscribe to email and using Power Automate.
This article compares report bursting using Power Automate with BI Helper. To compare 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 workflows to export and distribute Power BI reports in PDF, PowerPoint, Excel and other file formats.
Prerequisites: At least one Power BI workspace needs to be backed by a Power BI Premium capacity to access the 'Export to File' API in Power BI, along with a Microsoft 365 subscription to use Power Automate.
Workflow Automation Steps
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 or Fabric capacity needed to use Power Automate for report bursting has a variable pricing based on size, region and usage. F64 Fabric capacity at $5,000 per month is the threshold for Power BI content consumers to interact without additional paid per-user licenses. Go to Power BI Pricing Plan for details.
Creating a report subscription requires a Power BI Pro ($14/mo per user) or Premium Per User ($24/mo) license. External recipients are supported only in a paid, non-PPU Premium capacity workspace.
Flow creation, flow maintenance and data-source orchestration (filter values and report recipient lists) are manual activities. Selecting pages, visuals and bookmarks adds more manual steps. Analytics and reporting teams waste a lot of time on these tasks, instead of using their skills to derive intelligence and insights from business data.
Details on the export and email of Power BI reports with Power Automate are at this Microsoft Learn article.
BI Helper is a browser-based application which generates and distributes PDF and PowerPoint 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 both internal and external users. 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 Standard 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 our Manual Filter and Slicer Input tutorial for details.
In the Premium and Enterprise plans, BI Helper offers automated filter and slicer input, which reads the latest filter values and email IDs from power BI before every job run. BI Helper automatically creates and emails filtered, user-specific PDF/ PPTX reports on schedule or on demand, with no manual input. This popular feature is used by over 50% of all PDF/ PPTX reports in BI Helper. See our Automated Filter and Slicer Input tutorial for details.
1. Given the licensing and administrative costs of Power BI Premium, Power Automate based report bursting is only affordable by large enterprises. This leaves out small and medium enterprises, who form the majority of Power BI customers!
By contrast, BI Helper scales on-demand from very small volumes to enterprise scale reporting.
2. Despite its high cost, the Power Automate solution has limited features and requires multiple manual steps to set up and maintain. In contrast, BI Helper is a fully automated report bursting solution with advanced features.
3. Finally, BI Helper addresses a large market gap by delivering filtered user-specific PDF and PowerPoint reports to external users with no licensing or maintenance overhead.
Learn more about BI Helper and sign up for your 7-day free trial!
