BI Helper is a SaaS product which automates the creation and distribution of user-specific PDF and PPTX reports from Power BI and Tableau. Over 200 businesses across the world routinely use BI Helper to share actionable information and insights with their customers, vendors and employees.  

BI Helper is a browser-based application hosted in the AWS US East-1 region. It is fast, secure and scalable, and easy to set up and use. BI Helper is used by global enterprises to send out thousands of reports every day, as well as by small and mid-sized businesses whose volumes start from a dozen reports per month.

BI Helper opens Power BI reports in embedded mode and Tableau reports via their APIs. It applies the selected filter/ slicer value to the report, then snapshots the report tabs as image files. Finally, BI Helper combines the image files into a high-resolution PDF/ PPTX and emails it to the specified end-user.  

BI Helper repeats this process for each combination of input filter/ slicer value and recipient email IDs, thereby creating and distributing user-specific outputs from a Power BI or Tableau report.

Yes, the field has to be defined as a slicer or report level filter (Filters on all pages) in Power BI and given as an input to BI Helper.

In Tableau, define the field as a workbook filter, then provide it as the input to BI Helper.

You can enter them in the input table in BI Helper or use the Excel/ CSV template to upload them. Premium subscribers can use the automated input mode to apply the latest filter and slicer values before every job run.

BI Helper uses AWS SES (Simple Email Service) to send your PDF/ PPTX reports to end-users. You can define and validate any sender email ID of your choice in BI Helper. In fact, you can set up a different sender email for every job based on your report and its audience. E.g., sales@mycompany.com, operations@mycompany.com, ITreports@mycompany.com.

You don't need to configure SMTP or any other email protocol to send emails from BI Helper.

BI Helper has a standard process to authenticate sender email IDs by making them DMARC compliant. This ensures that leading providers like Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo recognize that the emails are legitimate, not spam or phishing emails. See Email Authentication in BI Helper for details.

In the Standard license, BI Helper creates the PDF/ PPTX files in each job run as a batch and saves them in the user's AWS S3 bucket. It then emails and deletes them immediately.

In the Premium license, BI Helper creates and emails the output files in each job run and also stores them in the user's AWS S3 bucket for 5 days, after which they are deleted.

Yes, Premium subscribers can split the creation and emailing of reports into independent processes. It is not supported in the Standard license.

Premium users can disable Send Email in their jobs before generating the PDF/ PPTX reports. These reports are stored in AWS S3 for 5 days, after which they are deleted. In this time, users can download them from our SFTP server, review the files, then go back to BI Helper and email them.

No. To run BI Helper, the only software you need is a browser. Create your account at BI Helper - Sign Up, set up your Power BI or Tableau reports as BI Helper jobs and start running them.

BI Helper does not impose any limits on the page count or file size of the PDF/ PPTX output files. However, AWS SES (which BI Helper uses to send emails) has a limit of 40 MB per email including attachments.

Premium subscribers can generate PDF/ PPTX files larger than 40 MB and download them from our SFTP server. These large files cannot be sent via BI Helper, and users need to set up other methods to distribute them.

In all BI Helper subscription plans, there is no limit on the number of Power BI and Tableau reports you can set up as BI Helper jobs. There is no limit on the number of PDF/ PPTX files you can generate in a month (or in a day or any other duration) either.

Set up your Power BI or Tableau reports as BI Helper jobs based on filter/ slicer selection, run schedules and other reporting parameters.

Yes, BI Helper is designed to handle report volumes of all sizes. In benchmarking tests, BI Helper generates up to 1,000 PDF/ PPTX reports per job in one hour.

Based on job sizes and schedules, BI Helper dynamically spins up servers and other resources on AWS to generate reports in parallel threads. These can be customized to meet your throughput requirements.

Power BI: When BI Helper opens your Power BI report in embedded mode, your report stays in your tenant. BI Helper does not have permission to read and copy your reports or their datasets. BI Helper can only view your Power BI report pages, snapshot them as images and combine them into a PDF/ PPTX, as noted above.
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Tableau: To restrict access to your report data, you can define the Tableau APIs to which BI Helper has permissions.

No, it doesn't. BI Helper uses OAuth to connect to Power BI and Tableau, which is at the user level and not at the organization level. This means that BI Helper can only view Power BI or Tableau reports accessible to the user who is logged in.

Recommended: Create a Power BI or Tableau service account for BI Helper with access only to the reports which you want to run on BI Helper. Use this service account to run your BI Helper jobs.

Your credentials are secure with BI Helper. Power BI OAuth2 and Tableau API tokens are encrypted using AES 256 and stored in the application database. They are not human-readable, not even by the BI Helper admin.

BI Helper has multiple data security safeguards including data encryption, virtual network, multi-factor authentication, detailed alerts and logging.

BI Helper operates within the security framework of your organization. Because it uses OAuth to connect to Power BI or Tableau, its permissions are limited to that of the user who is logging in, and to the information security policies applied to that individual.

Further, BI Helper limits its access to your data by opening your reports in embedded read-only mode. It cannot copy or edit your reports or their datasets.

Yes, BI Helper supports Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) with Power BI. No manual login is required at report runtime.

Yes, it does. BI Helper offers data sovereignty as an option in the Enterprise license. We will set up a BI Helper instance in the AWS region of your choice (or closest based on availability) and move the PDF/ PPTX creation, storage and emailing to it.

BI Helper uses OAuth to connect to the user's workspaces and reports in Power BI and Tableau. To secure this access and minimize the possibilities of any data incident, we recommend that you:

1. Create a Power BI or Tableau service account for BI Helper which can only access the reports to be run on BI Helper.
2. Do not allow this service account to access any other IT resources of your organization.
3. Enable Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for this account and let BI Helper login using MFA.

Yes, BI Helper has an automated input mode to fetch filter/ slicer values and recipient email IDs from your Power BI data model or Tableau report. See this tutorial to Automate Filter and Slicer Input.

BI Helper provides email alerts at the individual PDF/ PPTX level, i.e., for each filter/ slicer + email combination that failed.

During and after job execution, you can go to the Job History tab to see which reports were generated successfully and which ones failed. This tab shows the history of the last 15 job runs.

BI Helper uses a Power BI trigger which confirms that all the visuals in a report tab have loaded completely, and only then snapshots the tab. Very rarely and sporadically, this trigger fires prematurely, causing BI Helper to take incomplete snapshots.

To fix this, go to the Generate PDF > Advanced section in BI Helper and add a time delay of 30 seconds between report pages. This gives the pages time to render fully before the snapshot but increases the job execution time. Test with different values of time delay to optimize the job execution time.

Yes, you can. BI Helper has a highly granular and customizable job scheduler, which allows you to define any combination of month, week, day of week, date and time that you choose. So that your end-users get their reports exactly when they need them, with no manual intervention or action required by you.

No, it doesn’t. Since BI Helper snapshots your report tabs as image files, rather than reading the underlying dataset, it does not support the scrolling of visuals, which is the basis of paginated reports.

However, our Premium license allows you to export table and matrix visuals to Excel and attach them with the PDF/ PPTX reports. The Excel files support full vertical and horizontal scrolling of the table or matrix and contain all the rows and columns of data.

The BI Helper Premium license allows you to export table and matrix visuals from Power BI or Tableau to Excel and send them as email attachments along with the PDF/ PPTX. The Excel files are filtered on the same values as the PDF/ PPTX. For more details, see Automate the export of Power BI table and matrix visuals to Excel.