Report Sharing Options in Power BI — Pros and Cons
Here is a typical use case for report distribution from Power BI.
A National Sales Manager needs to send a weekly performance report to his 20 District Managers and 250 Branch Managers. These people are busy! They do not have the time to login to Power BI Service, interact with their report and analyze their KPIs in depth. Nor does the organization want to buy 270+ Power BI Pro licenses just for this purpose.
All they need is a PDF in their inbox customized for their KPIs, which they can discuss with their manager for 10 minutes on Monday morning as they start their week.
Power BI Report Sharing Options — Pros and Cons
Power BI offers several out-of-box options to share reports with users. These are discussed here.
- Manual: Apply report filters, download PDFs individually and email them.
- Email subscription: One page at a time for reports.
3. Power BI Embedded: Detailed information on Power BI Embedded is available here.
4. Report distribution using Azure Active Directory B2B.
Here is a white paper on its implementation.
Conclusion
Options 1 and 2 are push-based processes that enable distribution of PDFs but they are not scalable and are prone to human error.
Options 3 and 4 are pull-based and make report content accessible to users at scale but they don’t allow distribution of PDFs. Users need Power BI licenses to login and view their reports, which requires system administration expertise (and cost) to implement and support.
In summary, out of the box push-based methods for report distribution in Power BI are not scalable and pull-based methods involve cost and complexity.
BI Helper
BI Helper bihelper.tech is a simple, secure and cost effective SaaS solution for PDF report distribution in Tableau and Power BI. You only need a single Power BI / Tableau license to generate your PDF reports.
Resource: BI Helper Tutorial | Report Distribution in BI Tools
