Distributing Power BI reports and dashboards to end-users is a common requirement. Businesses routinely need to deliver standard reports to internal and external users - employees, customers, and vendors. The generation and distribution of these reports need to be automated and based on a schedule or a trigger event.

To achieve this, Power BI lets users schedule and subscribe to reports and dashboards from Power BI Service, which is documented at this link. Every subscriber to a report or dashboard needs a Power BI license (Pro, PPU, or Fabric).

Users with a PPU or Fabric license receive the entire Power BI report as a PDF / PPTX attachment in their email. But with a Pro license, users only get the selected report page embedded in an email along with a link to the report URL in Power BI Service.

This works for simple use cases when users only need to view a single page of a report, or when all recipients can be allowed to view a common information set (where one set of slicers and filters is applied to a subscription).

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Limitations of Subscribe to Email in Power BI

In our experience with designing and building Power BI reports for a variety of businesses, there are many situations where the Subscribe to email feature has serious limitations.

1. Power BI reports are often multi-page. Having to subscribe to them one page at a time results in the report getting scattered in multiple emails and information getting broken up and lost. It just doesn’t work.

2. Report bursting is a common need. End-users need to see only their data, rather than a standard report. Example: Company A needs to send 3-page KPI reports to its 50 sales managers every week. Each sales manager must receive a report copy filtered on their unique KPI data. This is not possible with Power BI Subscribe unless you create 50 copies of the report on Power BI Service and subscribe them individually to the sales managers. Creating and managing this manually is expensive and error prone.

3. End-users (like the above sales managers) are busy people. They do not have the time to log in to Power BI to run detailed analyses on their data. All they need is a PDF delivered in their email, which they can quickly review with their teams or managers and plan their work for the day or week. Paying for Power BI licenses for every manager makes the Subscribe to email feature expensive. Having to open multiple emails for a multi-page report makes it inefficient.

4. Another common need is for reports to be delivered to external users. Example: An IT infrastructure services company needs to send standard monthly performance reports covering Help Desk, Infosec, and Assets Managed to its 200 clients, who use the reports to review its performance and act on the findings. As in the previous example, end-users (client IT managers) don’t have the time to log in to Power BI to analyze their reports. Instead, they prefer to review a PDF report and flag action / problem areas. Paying for Power BI licenses and setting up Azure Active Directory access for 200 external users makes the process expensive and tedious.

5. There are restrictions on the number of subscriptions per report, PDF file size, and on-demand report delivery. In summary, while the Subscribe feature works in some situations, it leaves many use cases unfulfilled. It is also largely manual, which means upfront and recurring costs.

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BI Helper: The Smart Solution for Report Distribution

BI Helper is designed specifically for PDF report generation and distribution. It addresses all the above limitations and provides users with a simple, secure, and scalable way to export PDFs from Power BI and distribute them. It also has a number of advanced features to automate and customize the entire process, making it very convenient for businesses to meet their report distribution requirements.

It does all this most cost-effectively - users only need a single Power BI Pro license to use BI Helper and distribute PDF reports to any number of internal and external users.

To learn more, visit BI Helper. We offer a 7-day free trial, with no credit card required.

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