Power BI Report Builder & Paginated Reports

Formatting Power BI reports for laptop or tablet delivery is quite forgiving. For example, a long table can be viewed simply by scrolling. No page breaks to worry about. But what about printed investor financial reports, for example, or invoices? There are times you need to control formatting exactly for delivery as a PDF or on paper, constraining tables to fit on a page and adding headers and footers. That’s where building paginated reports in Power BI Report Builder comes in.

In this on-demand webinar, learn the basics of working with Power BI Report Builder. We demo

  • The difference between interactive and static report delivery
  • The benefits of and use cases for paginated reports
  • How to use Report Builder to
    • Connect to a data source/dataset to build a report
    • Design a basic “pixel perfect” report page
    • Publish a report
    • Report Builder licensing and use

Presenter

Patrick Powers
Trainer & Consultant
Senturus, Inc.

Patrick has 20 years of experience in training, business intelligence and data analytics. He’s one of our trainers, delivering classes on Power BI, Tableau and Cognos. His certifications include multiple programming languages, including Java and C++, and database certification (MS SQL).

Machine transcript

0:05
Greetings and welcome to this latest installation of the Senturus Knowledge Series. Today we’re pleased to be presenting to you on the topic of Power BI Report builder and paginated reports.

0:18
Before we get into the presentation itself, a couple of housekeeping items.

0:23
Please feel free to use the GotoWebinar control panel to make this session interactive, and while we have everyone’s microphones muted out of courtesy to our presenter, we encourage you to enter your questions in the question pane shown on the slide.

0:36
And while we’re generally able to respond to your questions while the webinars in progress, if we don’t happen to reply immediately, will cover it in the Q&A section at the end. So stick around for that.

0:47
Or if we’re unable to cover all of the answers during the presentation, will provide a written response document that we’ll post on senturus.com, which leads us logically into the next question. Can I get a copy of the presentation?

1:02
And the answer’s absolutely. It is available currently on senturus.com/resources section

1:09
or you can click the link that’s been put in the chat window of GoToWebinar’s control panel.

1:17
While you’re there, be sure to bookmark it, as it contains a lot of great resources on all things BI.

1:24
Our topics today will include the challenges of report authoring, talking about what are paginated reports, data sources and paginated reporting, building a paginated report, static versus interactive reporting, publishing reports, and Report Builder licensing, and we’ll cap it all off with a couple of demos on creating a paginated report.

1:46
Our overall agenda, we’ll do some quick introductions, and then we’ll get into the heart of the presentation, and the demos.

1:54
At the end, we’ll do a brief Senturus overview, for those of you who may not be familiar with what we do here at Senturus, along with some great, additional resources.

2:04
We have some introductions here.

2:12
I’m joined by Patrick Powers. Patrick has 20 years of experience in BI and data analytics. He’s one of our trainers delivering classes on Power BI, Tableau, and Cognos.

2:23
And he possesses many certifications including multiple programming languages, Java C plus, and database certification on MS SQL. He’s also one of our Power BI gurus, my name is Mike Weinhaur, I’m a Director here at Senturus among my roles I have the pleasure of emceeing our knowledge series events.

2:45
Before we get into the presentation, we always like to get a finger on the pulse of what our audience is doing or using. Our first poll today is: How do you deliver reporting today to a single selection question.

3:00
Do data dumps IE table based quote? Unquote reports do, duplicate existing Excel spreadsheets? Have you built highly interactive dashboards?

3:11
Have you implemented self-service report authoring or some combination of all of the above?

3:19
So go ahead and get those votes in, and we’ll give you 15 minutes to get those in.

3:33
OK, we’re at about three quarters here. I’m going to close that out and share it.

3:37
Not too surprising, though, vast majority here, doing some combination of all of those out of Excel spreadsheets, Fair bit of highly interactive reports, but mostly a combination.

3:51
All right, and then we have a second poll today.

3:54
What type of licensing are you using at your organization with regards to Power BI?

4:00
You can check all that apply.

4:04
Are you just using the free download of Power BI Desktop?

4:07
Have you upgraded to Power BI Pro, or is your organization using premium or premium per user, or are you not using Power BI presently?

4:17
So, I’ll go ahead and get those answers in.

4:34
80% here, and that’s kind of gotten their voice heard, so, I’ll share this out.

4:40
Evenly split between desktop and Pro, and then almost a third going premium and then 20% or so premium users, And about 20% not using Power BI.

4:53
So, it seems like about the right distribution there.

4:57
Great. Well, thank you for sharing your situation with us. We always appreciate understanding our audience a little better.

5:04
And with that, I’m going to hand the floor and the microphone over to Mr. Powers Patrick, take it away.

5:11
Hello, everybody. Welcome, welcome, welcome.

5:16
I see some names in there. People, I know, you just show up, because you hear that I’m doing a class, right? Lie to me, tell me. Tell me that you’re just here for me. So, what are we going to do today?

5:30
Let’s start out by talking about the challenges of report authoring.

5:38
Too often you said this in the poll, too often people want us to recreate what they’re already used to using, right? We always hear, well, that’s the way we’ve always done it.

5:52
And that’s what people want. People want to be happy. People want, something they’re used to. One of the fundamental truths of report delivery is give the people what they want.

6:04
And even though what they want may not be what they need.

6:10
So sometimes we have to figure out, how do I replicate this Excel spreadsheet, this paper form, all these things that have been in your business for 30, 40, 50 years.

6:24
We’ve been publishing invoices like this since my grandfather owned the company. Oh, congratulations!

6:31
Modern tools, however, are not geared for that, are they?

6:38
Modern tools are now focusing on visualizations. Hey, look, look at this cool bar chart. You can do. Look at this word, cloud. Look at all this, well, how do you put that onto an invoice?

6:52
How do you put that into a different scenario?

6:56
So you find yourself with a challenge.

7:00
So what do we do?

7:02
Hey, look at this.

7:04
This is beautiful.

7:06
I mean, minus the Microsoft Color scheme. This is beautiful, right.

7:12
But this doesn’t work for everybody.

7:14
This doesn’t work for certain needs. It’s too graphical.

7:20
This is a modern look at data, and that’s OK.

7:27
Well, welcome to paginated reports, or SSRS with a new interface.

7:37
Yes, for those of you who have been thinking that, gosh, this looks like really something familiar? It should.

7:45
But paginated reports.

7:48
They’re designed to be printed or shared.

7:51
They’re called paginated, because they’re formatted to fit well on a page to replicate a page to display data in a table.

8:06
They’re also known as pixel perfect.

8:10
And this is one of the, yeah, the heck happened there. This is one of the challenges of using this tool.

8:22
And this is something that some of you are going to have to kind of pause and think about, Is this the right path for me?

8:29
Because we are looking to make pixel perfect types of layout, everything’s wonderfully aligned, Look at that green bar, reporting’s style, you can take this, you can print it out, you can mail it off to a customer, you’re, and you’re all set.

8:50
But, that doesn’t happen automatically.

8:54
There’s still work that has to be done.

8:57
To do all this, we use Power BI, Report Builder.

9:02
It is a standalone tool, OK, please be aware that this is a standalone tool.

9:09
The expectation is that you’re using it in conjunction with Power BI. But it can be downloaded right now.

9:17
And you could go ahead, and you could use it just today without anything else, so that 19% of you that are currently not using Power BI tech, you can download this and be on your way.

9:32
And you’d be on your way to building some nice pixel, perfect principal reports.

9:37
Wow, say that 10 times fast. Pixel perfect, presentable reports.

9:47
Why would you use this?

9:49
It can solve many problems for an organization.

9:53
The primary thought process for most folks is, hey, I’m going to use this to print out. I’m going to use this to share hard copies.

10:02
I’m going to use this as an alternative to doing things in Excel, Which is great.

10:09
But wait, there’s more beyond just doing that in a traditional way.

10:15
These are good things to put up on kiosks, or when you have reports with non-standard layouts.

10:24
Because again, pixel perfect means that you can put a box anywhere you want, you can put things any tab, any indent? Anything, any way you want.

10:37
Again, if that takes you back to the olden days of report Building.

10:41
Yeah, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

10:44
If it didn’t still work, it wouldn’t still be here.

10:49
Another good use for a lot of folks is public distribution.

10:54
This is a great way to get data out to the masses in a PDF type of format that people, again, might be printing or sharing.

11:06
But here let’s take a look at an example of that.

11:10
Here is an example that is published out by University of Michigan.

11:17
This is a public document, it’s their budget document. And this is the kind of thing that people would use this for summary information.

11:26
Publicly shared data, financial reporting.

11:31
And look, look at how wonderful that is.

11:37
Wonderful in the sense that it’s easy to read, that it’s well laid out.

11:42
It’s well organized it’s nicely indented.

11:47
This would print and be shareable in a beautiful way, and it’s going to make everybody in your organization happy.

11:57
It’s even going to make that person who has been here since the 19 seventies. Happy.

12:02
Hey. Look at that.

12:04
It’s wonderful.

12:08
Now, some of the advantages here single paginated report can have multiple different data sources.

12:16
We don’t necessarily have an underlying data model, necessarily, whereas in Power BI, we need an underlying data model for the initial release.

12:29
Mind you, this is, this is semi new, in terms of being Report Builder, not technology, but in terms of the tool itself, it’s semi new.

12:39
So there’s some things still that you can and can’t do.

12:42
For the initial release.

12:44
You can create your own embedded data source, which is what I’m going to do today.

12:50
Or you could use datasets that have been published, the reports are created locally.

13:01
This means you need to think about the dataset you’re using.

13:06
You’re not necessarily going to connect up to a database and bring in a thousand tables and 10 million rows of data, because you’re doing this locally.

13:18
So you want to be careful with that, especially when we start running and we start putting things into cache.

13:23
If we’re connecting the on premise data, after you upload, you do need to create a gateway and redirect the connection.

13:33
Ooh, that sounds like fun.

13:36
Currently, these are the data sources that you can use.

13:42
This information is from Microsoft, and this is correct, as of April. I believe April fourth was the last time they published this.

13:52
So, hey, if they’ve changed anything.

13:54
In the last couple of days, it’s news to me.

13:58
But these are the data sources that we can use.

14:02
So we can use an Azure data Source, We can use Analysis Services.

14:08
We’ve got SQL Server directly, Power BI Datasets, which is probably what a lot of you are going to do that 40, what, 45% with Power BI Pro and the 29% with Power BI Premium.

14:25
This is more in your world, in your realm.

14:30
Then, of course, we’ve got standard databases like Oracle and Teradata.

14:35
And we get the ball rolling.

14:39
How do we build this?

14:41
We’ve got some options.

14:43
Now, I know that I’ve been saying, it’s Pixel, perfect. It’s meant for printing, and it’s meant for sharing, yadda, and yadda.

14:49
That doesn’t mean that it’s non graphical.

14:53
You can still have things like this, where I’ve got, basically, a scorecard style report, where I’ve got some Spark lines in here. I’ve got some nice bars going on.

15:08
But, again, it’s the layout.

15:10
Look at the borders.

15:12
Look at the columns, look at the bolding.

15:16
So we can have matrix style reports. We can have charts.

15:22
We can also have free form.

15:25
The easiest way to jump into this is to start with the Wizard.

15:31
The wizard lets you walk through this, building tables, matrix, charts, et cetera.

15:38
Once we have the data on the page, then we start dragging and dropping fields. We select Layouts and we start customizing.

15:49
So we can use the wizard to help us get the data we need.

15:56
And then we go to work on putting it all together.

15:59
Yeah.

16:01
No questions yet, which is surprising but you know, so far, so good. I’ve take it.

16:10
There’s also a map wizard.

16:14
You can have maps on here.

16:16
Maps can be spatial data from SQL queries. They can be as reshaped files. And, you know, as we all use, you can bring in Microsoft Bing Maps.

16:30
Now, remember, this isn’t necessarily interactive reporting.

16:36
The primary goal is to replicate something that would be looked at on a page, so there are some limitations as far as what we can and cannot do.

16:49
We cannot define drilled Thoreau’s, can’t have document maps, and can’t be pinned to a dashboard.

16:59
It can, however, be subscribed to, and it can be exported, 73 different ways.

17:08
Eight but close enough, we can dump this out as HTML, M, PDF, et cetera.

17:17
And notice that most of these are distribution style methods, especially things like the PDF, the Word, Excel, We send them out.

17:30
How do we publish one of these?

17:33
I just said that they’re created local.

17:38
How do I publish this?

17:42
You can use your deployment pipeline, and this lets you move it through your three stages.

17:51
Couple of questions come through before I move on the next slide. I don’t know the answer on the map layer, but yes, it can definitely have page numbers. A matter of fact, we’re going to be adding one in our demo.

18:03
So there was a question about can it have a page number. Absolutely.

18:07
There was also a question about a map layer coming from a KML file that I don’t know and hopefully somebody who’s on here might be able to handle it.

18:17
Another question about security. Yes, you can have security. You can have row level security in here.

18:23
There are ways to handle things like that.

18:26
So I’m going to keep going here, and let somebody else take a look at the questions for a minute.

18:32
When we go to publish, we do need a Power BI Premium user license, a per user Premium license.

18:45
Without a pro license, you can only publish to my workspace. But if you want to do it in other Workspace, is, you’ve got to have a Power BI premium per user license.

18:57
This is available on P 1, 2, 3

19:01
And you could also use it with a four to a six for embedded or test and dev scenarios, OK.

19:12
And with that, let’s take a look at this.

19:18
Let’s take a look.

19:20
Now, I’ve already got mind open.

19:22
And what we’re going to do is I’m going to connect to a Data Source.

19:27
I’m going to design a layout. Let’s show you how to add things to that layout.

19:32
And, then, I’m going too hopefully, assuming my license is working today, I’m going to show you how to publish.

19:39
All right.

19:39
So, we’ll see that we’ll see what a workspace looks like and I’ll publish it. Where am I?

19:50
Now, I’ve already started it up, and I’m already out the wizard.

19:56
Look, look at that.

19:58
Look at how fancy this is.

20:01
Yeah, fancy.

20:04
I’m going to go through a table or Matrix Wizard.

20:09
I’m just going to start with that.

20:11
And obviously, the first thing it wants me to do is pick a dataset.

20:16
Well, I don’t have any datasets, so I’m going to create one.

20:21
And as I mentioned earlier, I’m going to be using a local SQL connection for this. I have SQL server running on this machine.

20:31
I’m going to be connecting up to a local SQL server.

20:36
If I was connected up to, if there were any published data sets out in my workspaces, I could use, I can browse for those, but I’m going to go straight in.

20:47
I’m going to create a new Connection, Connection type SQL Server.

20:57
Everybody, everybody, cross your fingers. Say what you want to say. Let’s make sure the demo deities that be are with me and that my-sql server has no issues.

21:10
Thank you.

21:12
Because that’s always fun thing, especially when you got 160 people listening to you.

21:19
Look at what I’m using somebody out there is getting a chuckle. I’m going to be using go sales data today.

21:27
And the reason I’m using go sales is that there’s something you need to think about.

21:34
Say, see, I knew I’d get somebody to chuckle.

21:38
The one thing you need to think about when you’re connecting to a database like this, you don’t need to bring over only the fields you want to display.

21:51
You need to bring over any associated tables, OK?

21:58
You need to bring over anything that might be needed for a joint.

22:06
Think about that, all right, do OK.

22:11
And I’m just going to make sure things are good here.

22:15
Yay!

22:18
Thank goodness.

22:20
Now I’ve got my connection, there it is.

22:25
And oh, look.

22:27
There it is.

22:29
There’s all my, all my tables, my schema, is available to me.

22:35
I can bring this out. This looks exactly the same as what I would see in here.

22:42
Absolutely. No differences between those two.

22:47
What if you already had sequel written?

22:54
What if you already were doing this as a data dump if you were doing this as CSV so that you put it out on an FTP or something?

23:03
Well, guess what?

23:05
I can import in.

23:08
So I can import in an existing SQL already L file, or I can literally copy and paste.

23:18
OK.

23:19
I can do it as straight text.

23:23
And for those of you who really want to get fancy, I can copy in a stored proc.

23:31
So if you wanted to do and leverage something you already have, you can copy and paste that SQL in right here.

23:42
Now that is probably a timesaver for quite a few of you. That’s probably something that just got a bunch of you excited and interested. I don’t have to rewrite this now.

23:53
For those of us who are not as fortunate.

23:58
We’re going to take it in manually, take it in manually now. I’m going to bring in a whole lot of tables first. I’m going to start a branch.

24:08
Notice that when I hover over branch, it’s telling me, hey, if you want to use this table, here are potentially related tables that you’re going to also need to bring in for joint purposes.

24:27
Also, you’ll see that it brought in the whole table, but I don’t need all of these fields.

24:35
We just need enough again to stress it one more time, we need enough, four, the joins, and what I’m going to put on the report itself. So if I go to country and I expand our country, I don’t need everything in country.

24:52
I just need those three fields.

24:58
I’m going to bring in a few more here. Now I’m going to be a little lazy.

25:03
I’m just going to check them.

25:10
Do, do, do, do I think that’s well some MS and on this and sales region, and my time dimension.

25:21
And from this schema, bring an employee and from this schema, retailer, retailer, site, and retailer type.

25:34
I would encourage you to go through, and delete stuff you don’t need, not because it’s going to necessarily impact the performance or anything along those lines. It will just make it easier for you.

25:51
It’ll make it easier when you’re trying to find the fields you’re looking for, because this is going to display. This is a flat set of tables. And I just blew out something I shouldn’t have. That’s where we got to be very careful, isn’t that, we don’t want to blow out things.

26:07
We, I don’t mean to check, check, check, check, check, check.

26:17
Do you got rid of that, need to bring that back in?

26:22
So be careful when you’re don’t get overexcited and start deleting things, but as you see, it was not difficult for me to bring back the field that I needed.

26:32
It did, however, put that field down the bottom. So that’s a little bit of, gosh, golly, I got to remember that it’s down the bottom now. Do think that’s about all. I want to get rid of here for now. Nope, got a couple more.

26:55
Hi.

26:59
As I already mentioned, this is very old school.

27:06
This is very old school.

27:10
Lot of manual work.

27:11
A lot of things you need to do on your own.

27:16
One thing that it does attempt to do is it attempts to auto detect relationships. So that’s pretty good.

27:25
When I go to hit Next, Oh, I brought in two tables that are not connected to anything.

27:35
The time dimension, an employee, they’re not connected.

27:40
It was unable to auto detect.

27:45
Yeah.

27:47
Any relationship between these two tables in the rest of my tables?

27:54
The first thing I’m going to do is turn off auto detect.

27:59
Notice this little arrow right here.

28:02
Man, assume, I can go ahead, and I can bring that, and expand that out.

28:07
I can collapse this for a moment to give me some more room.

28:10
Collapse that give me more room, here are the relationships that it found.

28:19
These are the relationships that it’s found.

28:23
I’m going to add my own.

28:27
And for this one, I am going to pick, am I going to pick, I’m going to pick Order hatter, two time dimension.

28:41
I’m going to say my order date.

28:47
I missed is equal to my day date.

28:51
So there’s one that takes care of my time dimension.

28:55
Add a second one, and this one is going to also be ordered hatter to employee.

29:08
This will be sales staff code, two employee code.

29:14
This one should be pretty obvious, why it wasn’t able to pick it up automatically.

29:21
Those two fields are so unrelated, hey, don’t blame it.

29:29
This one, it didn’t pick up because there are multiple dates out there.

29:35
So that could have created an ambiguous joy, and it could have created an improper join.

29:42
So I had to specify this one, which means that if you’re going to use this in this type of format, if you’re going to use this connectivity to connect directly to a database, you’re going to need to know your data.

29:58
You’re going to need to have a data map available. You’re going to need to know what you’re looking for and what you’re looking at.

30:05
All right, now that we’ve got that.

30:11
I can also add filters here.

30:14
Because I deleted a lot of the language fields, I am going to build a filter.

30:24
And I am going to build a filter on product language.

30:31
I’m going to say that my product language is equal to E N.

30:38
So this way, I won’t get any weird joy issues. I won’t get additional, there’s actually 17 different languages in here.

30:45
I’m only going to get English for the sake of this demo.

30:50
I’m going to add a second filter.

30:55
This one is going to be on time dimension, and I’m going to filter this for a single year.

31:03
One of the questions that I briefly saw came through was, Can we have prompts? Can we have parameters?

31:11
Here is where I can define these as parameters if I wanted to.

31:16
So, I can set this up as a parameter iced value.

31:24
All right, if I did everything right?

31:27
I should not get an error this time.

31:31
When I hit next, everybody got their fingers crossed for me.

31:35
Here we go.

31:40
Because I picked tableware Matrix, it now says, OK, how do you want to arrange these fields?

31:49
How do you want things to look?

31:52
Cool.

31:54
This is a matter of dragging and dropping, and I’m going to take my order method.

32:00
I’m going to take my product line and my product type. And there’s the rows of my report.

32:10
And further columns.

32:14
I’m going to do month, the end.

32:15
What we’re going to create here is a monthly report for each of the order methods based on the year 2012.

32:27
And currently, I only have a few measures in here and I’m going to bring me over. Quantity.

32:36
That’s pretty straightforward. It very much is the comment was made that this is pivot table stuff. Absolutely.

32:45
Absolutely.

32:50
It is now giving me a preview and it’s asking me to define my totals in my layouts, I would like to see some day subtitles.

33:04
So I’m going to make it indented with subtotals like this.

33:08
And I’m going to allow it to expand and collapse.

33:17
This is our final part of the wizard.

33:25
And there we go.

33:27
Look it out. Exciting. That is gay.

33:33
But this, this isn’t about excitement.

33:36
This is about meeting business needs, And that’s what this is going to let us do.

33:42
It’s going to let us meet business needs, OK.

33:48
What we have to do from here is clean it up.

33:57
Right now, it’s not something that we could distribute. So we’re going to clean this up, and the first thing I’m going to do is I’m going to add a header.

34:06
I’m going to go to the Insert tab. I’m going to add a header.

34:10
I’m going to take this title box.

34:13
I’m going to drag it up to the header.

34:16
Yeah, that’s all.

34:19
2012 monthly report.

34:26
Hmm, hmm, At this point, I can see how my report is doing.

34:32
If I go back to Home, I can run this.

34:38
And this is going to show me what it’s going to look like on-screen.

34:44
And look at that.

34:46
Not bad.

34:48
But definitely not Pixel, perfect yet.

34:52
We need to format our numbers. We need to line columns up. Most importantly, I think everybody can see it.

35:02
Last time I checked, look, I know it is March 393rd, but last time I checked April, did not start the year.

35:12
So, we’re going to have to fix things like that.

35:14
The cool thing, look at that, ooh, ah, I can expand it out. So, earlier, I said, these are not interactive.

35:27
They’re interactive, when used, on screen.

35:35
Let’s go back to Design mode.

35:40
And let’s fix that sorting issue first.

35:44
So, here, I’m going to take this month, the Enfield.

35:48
I’m going to go to the Group Properties, and under the group Properties, I have some things I can change.

35:56
I could rename that, which would probably be…

36:01
Good thing to do, tell it how to group on it.

36:06
I can also create page breaks.

36:11
There’s the one we want and I’ll come back to that in a second, I can show or hide things.

36:19
Where would I want to use a Show or hide that’s what’s going on here?

36:24
Whether or not, when I run this, these are automatically expanded or not.

36:32
Product line yet, and product type are actually currently set to Hide, so that when I run this, don’t see him initially.

36:41
I can add more filters.

36:44
I can add in variables, I could even add in recursive parents, or document maps based on functions.

36:52
Look at all these cool functions, Whew!

36:57
Well, because it’s 237, we’re going to go with something simple. I’m going to sort.

37:05
And I just happen to have month number.

37:11
So, I’m going to sort by another column.

37:14
I’m going to sort month, the end, by month number.

37:17
There we go.

37:20
Now, I can continue to enhance this by adding in different things, like changing the colors, changing the font, and all of that is here under the Properties.

37:32
So if I wanted to, for example, to add a background color to that header, very easy.

37:41
Everything is here under properties, padding, border colors, et cetera.

37:50
Someone earlier asked if we could change an ad, page numbers, absolutely. There are built in fields that you can add.

38:02
Take a look at those built-in fields.

38:05
Execution time, which we already see on here.

38:08
Language, overall, page number, overall, total pages, the page, number itself, page name, et cetera.

38:20
Let me, let me pause for a second to answer one specific question from Rita.

38:25
About, yes. Power BI Builder is different from Power BI Desktop. Power BI Builder, again as its own standalone downloadable product.

38:37
It is not the same tool, it’s not accessible through there, it is started and run as its own product.

38:48
And I just, I think that was important enough for everybody to hear, again, that this is a separate one.

38:55
All right, So, I’m going to add, this.

38:59
I’m going to add page number on here, that.

39:03
And, oh, look. I can line it up with execution time.

39:07
One thing I can also do is change the size of this canvas.

39:14
If I want to add more, if I want to add additional stuff. If I want to move things over, so, now I can move this over.

39:25
Again, I’m going to keep it lined up. I could center this if I want to do.

39:30
And then I can add more data.

39:34
Hi, one thing I do want to do before I go any further, so I want to kind of align these things up.

39:42
Lot of control clicking, get used to it.

39:49
So, I’m going to go ahead, and I am going to Senator that and I’m going to take a quick preview.

40:06
Yeah, looking better.

40:08
At least, I’ve got my things in the right order now.

40:13
Center those two, everything will be lined up.

40:19
What if I need more fields?

40:21
What if I need a field that is not in here?

40:25
Yes.

40:27
I can create calculations.

40:29
So I can create my own fields if I go to my dataset.

40:34
There’s everything that I brought in.

40:38
If I right click that, I can add a calculated field.

40:44
And I can create a new calculated field, which I’m going to call Revenue.

40:50
And I’m going to use the functions.

40:54
I’m going to use fields from my dataset.

40:58
I will bring over as I scroll through this quantity times, unit sale price, just like that.

41:15
Now, I’ve got a new field in here.

41:18
Note that I can also delete more from here.

41:21
And again, I could change the query.

41:23
If I wanted to change the fields, I can turn on and off case sensitivity, add more filters, and add parameters.

41:32
All that stuff can be done stuff that I did in the wizard.

41:39
There’s my revenue Tata.

41:42
And I’m going to add this as a new field.

41:46
So I am click on this box right here.

41:53
Click in just the right place.

41:57
And I am going to insert a column inside the group to the left.

42:02
The group, in this case, is month EN, So, month the N will span my new value drop revenue in.

42:14
I’m going to take it.

42:22
And I am going to paste it here.

42:27
Set that one as bold.

42:31
Sure, right.

42:34
And before I go any further to answer one of the questions that did come through, yes. We can format numeric and currency formats. So I could set this to currency.

42:48
I use the comma, use, dollar, sign, et cetera.

42:53
And I can go ahead, and I can format my, my quantity.

42:58
Set it to number, make sure it’s using a comma, and fix those labels.

43:07
And let’s take a look at what I got now.

43:10
Yeah, what do I do?

43:15
Oh, they pick the wrong field in there.

43:20
Somebody did not.

43:28
Yeah, that’s looking right.

43:32
Fields, quantity value.

43:37
Megan?

43:41
Should just be that.

43:48
Let’s try that.

43:51
All right.

43:54
So.

43:58
Ah! She loved, when the things don’t go wrong here.

44:05
Yeah, I just did this the other day and everything worked beautifully.

44:09
Of course, it did.

44:11
So, you know, let’s try rebuilding that real quick, calculated field revenue.

44:24
OK, so far so good fields.

44:31
I want quantity times.

44:42
Sale price.

44:45
Uh.

44:49
Sure. We don’t have an invalid one in here, so I’m going to blow this one out real quick.

44:57
Yeah, drag that back in.

45:03
Everybody cross your fingers that it likes me this time.

45:10
I’m going to make sure it’s formatted correctly.

45:16
Sure. It’s Saturday. All right, here we go.

45:18
Yeah, there we go.

45:30
Doo, doo, does, this is doing everything, locally, Mind you, and I do have a pretty, excuse me, a pretty decent machine.

45:44
And look at that.

45:47
So what would be left to do, Things like centering the title, maybe moving the page numbers over, need to add borders.

45:59
Because you’ll notice that I don’t have borders on that new field that I added.

46:03
So really all it would be left here is some, some esthetic type fixes, cleaning things up, getting it ready for distribution.

46:17
Getting it ready to go out to the world, I could add column labels to this.

46:24
And now, now that I say, OK, life is grand.

46:29
No life as 100 grand. We’re going to publish it.

46:38
And I should be able to publish to my Workspace.

46:43
Now, it does not. I know that one of my guys is on right now.

46:48
It does not look like my licensing has been set up, because I don’t see. Well, let’s give it a name first.

46:55
Yep, yep. Let’s give it a name. Cross your fingers.

47:02
Now, apparently, I do not have the right license unfortunately.

47:11
So, let me see.

47:16
So, you have to have a Power BI Premium license in order to be able to publish to the Power BI Service and that’s what Patrick’s running into here. Yeah, and I was supposed to have one.

48:36
And Mike, I’m going to turn it back to you.

48:40
Alright, thanks Patrick.

48:43
Jump over to the slides, Patrick.

48:46
So, how can we help you out At Senturus here? We can help you move Power BI beyond the desktop.

48:53
And, by the way, stick around.

48:55
We’ve got a few slides here, and then we’ll get to the questions at the end.

49:03
So if you’re looking to bring about automation, you want enterprise accuracy speed and sharable dashboard reporting. We can help you achieve successful self-service analytics transitioning you from desktop to a scalable Power BI solution with enterprise class performance.

49:19
A little bit about Senturus.

49:20
We concentrate our expertise on business intelligence with a depth of knowledge across the entire BI stack.

49:29
Our clients know us for providing clarity from the chaos complex business requirements, disparate data sources, and constantly moving targets.

49:38
We have made a name for ourselves because of our strength and bridging the gap between IT and the business users.

49:44
We deliver solutions that give you access to reliable, analysis, ready data across the organization, so you can quickly and easily get answers at the point of impact decisions you make, and the actions you take.

49:56
Our consultants are leading experts in the field of analytics with years of pragmatic, real-world expertise, and experience advancing the state-of-the-art.

50:03
We’re so confident in our team, and our methodology that we back our projects with a 100% money back guarantee that is unique in the industry.

50:12
And we’ve been doing this for a long time.

50:14
We’ve been solely focused on business intelligence for over two decades now.

50:19
We work across the spectrum, Fortune 500, all the way to the mid-market, solving business problems across virtually every industry, and functional area, including the office of finance, sales, and marketing, manufacturing, operations, HR, and IT.

50:32
Our team is both large enough to meet all of your analytics needs. It’s small enough to provide personalized attention.

50:39
If you’re interested in joining us, we are presently hiring, you can see a list of positions, senior Microsoft architect, Senior BI architect, project manager, senior, Azure Architect, Modern Analytics, solution architect, ETL developer, and more.

50:54
You can get the job descriptions at senturus.com, in our career section, or you can send your resume to jobs@senturus.com.

51:03
We invite you to continue to expand your knowledge beyond today’s webinar, where you can find more resources on the Senturus website at senturus.com/resources/ where we have hundreds of resources from webinars on all things BI.

51:17
Two are fabulous up to the minute easily consumable blog.

51:21
Speaking of events, we have a couple of great upcoming events here.

51:25
Next week, we’ll be doing a webinar on the Senturus Analytics Connector allowing you to easily connect your Power BI and Tableau to your Cognos packages and data modules.

51:36
Then, on June 10th, we’ll be doing how to successfully implement self-service analytics discussing agile governance self-service BI with a focus on Cognos analytics.

51:47
I think we’d be remiss if we didn’t discuss our great training resources hosted by led by great trainers like Patrick.

51:55
We offer training in the three key platforms that we support: Microsoft Power BI, IBM Cognos Analytics and Tableau.

52:04
We are ideal for organizations that are running multiple platforms or those that might be moving from one of those to another.

52:10
And we offer all the different modalities, tailored group sessions.

52:12
one to one, small group mentoring, instructor-led online courses and self-paced eLearning that we can mix and match and organize in such a way that up that is optimized for your organization’s needs.

52:29
And Senturus provides hundreds of additional free resources on our website. As you can see here, everything from product reviews to our blog, to upcoming events. We’ve been committed to sharing our BI expertise for more than a decade.

52:43
We’ve got about seven minutes left for Q and A. There are a lot of different questions up there.

52:50
Did you have anything you wanted to pick out of there, Patrick?

52:53
Or Well.

52:55
So one thing, Debbie, I think that your question. You may have just seen the answer to that will look said, Senturus Connector work. We are having that presentation on that upcoming. Mike. What was the date on that? Again? Do you remember?

53:13
Yes, that’s, that’s just next week.

53:16
OK, so that, that takes care of that question Number one, Power Report. Builder is a free download and free to use. Yes, it is. But, again, remember, the limitation is on publishing.

54:08
There’s a lot of questions around the functionality of the product itself.

54:12
Right now, with SSRS, you should find that this has most, if not all of that functionality because, again, it really is sort of a re skin version, but it is a fundamentally different product from Power BI Desktop.

54:25
So, aside from some of these UIs, like Patrick showing you here in the ribbons, the rest of it is really very much SSRS

54:46
What else we got? I am not aware of adding tablets. At this point, there was a question about templates and putting one on each page.

54:54
There’s a question about bursting, page breaks and parameters. So, page bakes and parameters. Yes, they are absolutely available.

55:05
Let’s see, we talked about the licensing.

55:09
Is anything possible without a license?

55:14
Sure, I could do everything I’ve done today and I could go ahead and I could export this out as it is, you know, I could run this.

55:26
And I could print it, I could export it without having to publish it.

55:35
So as soon as the sides run, I can hit this export button.

55:40
While that’s doing, when you use a list, well, I would use a list depending upon what I’m trying to deliver, right? In this particular case, I wanted something that was a matrix, So that’s, I chose that, if I had just chosen a table. I could have had all of this going down, the rows, and I could have expanded in and out on month as well.

56:02
But as you can see, just with this product, you all saw that I was unable to publish today, so I can still export it.

56:11
There’s still that question was from Sarah.

56:14
Hopefully, sir, that answers that, that yeah, there’s still plenty you can do without having to publish it.

56:20
It is a standalone product, and I could use it like this, But you can open the output from this, you could not open in Power BI Desktop right off questions, because they are different format.

56:34
That is correct, they are different, and look, going back to what I said originally, things for distribution, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, CSV, XML.

56:50
You, the question is came in, you can set subscriptions on this. You absolutely can, assuming you do have the right on perm, license it.

56:59
So, yes, and when I say publish, I’m publishing it to my BI world, my BI Report Server. So the Senturus is Power BI service that we have set up. This is where I’m attempting to publish it.

57:16
So this way, it would be available for other folks to look at and use.

57:21
We got a question about, if you can publish this to an on perm report server, and I believe that it’s possible.

57:34
I believe that is possible as well.

57:53
So, if we missed any of these, we will circle back and we’ll publish that response document up to these trusted along with the tent for today’s presentation.

58:04
And a video of today’s webinar takes a little while because we do I make it right.

58:26
That’s the last slide.

58:40
That’s the one I’m looking for, OK. Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. Thank you, Patrick, our presenter.

58:46
And please reach out to us.

58:53
And thank you all for joining us for today’s event. We look for it on an upcoming event.

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