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BI Helper FAQs
How BI Helper works | Data security and privacy | Advanced features

How BI Helper works

BI Helper is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) servers in the US.

Power BI: BI Helper opens your Power BI report in embedded mode and applies the defined filters and slicers to it using JavaScript APIs. It then takes snapshots of the selected report pages as .png images and stitches them together to create a PDF.
Tableau: BI Helper uses Tableau APIs and applies the defined filters and slicers to it using JavaScript APIs. It then downloads the selected report pages as .png images and stitches them together to create a PDF.

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 copy your reports and datasets to our tenant. Nor does it have permissions to view your datasets in your tenant. BI Helper can only view your Power BI report pages and create PDFs from them as explained above.
Tableau: You can restrict the APIs BI Helper has access to.

In our Standard license, BI Helper generates and emails the PDFs in a job run, then deletes them immediately from our servers. In our Premium license, BI Helper generates and stores PDFs for a maximum of 5 days (user configurable) to allow users to download and review them. You can then come back to BI Helper and email the PDFs, after which they are deleted from our servers.

No, BI Helper runs entirely in the AWS cloud. Just create your account at https://portal.bihelper.tech and start setting up your reports as BI Helper jobs.

No, BI Helper is designed to create single or multi-page PDFs from Power BI/Tableau reports with no restriction on page count or file size. However, BI Helper cannot email PDFs larger than 8 MB due to limitations set by the AWS email system. You can download these large PDFs (and the smaller ones!) from our SFTP server and distribute them from there, but PDFs larger than 8 MB cannot be emailed from BI Helper.

You can set up and run as many Power BI/Tableau reports and BI Helper jobs as you want. You can set up a Power BI/Tableau report as one or more BI Helper jobs based on filter / slicer selection, runtime schedule and other parameters.

Yes, BI Helper can easily handle large PDF volumes. Based on your report size (# pages), BI Helper will dynamically provision the required infrastructure on AWS and generate your PDFs in multiple parallel threads. By default, BI Helper assigns 3 threads for each job but we can work with you to customize them to meet your delivery SLAs.

Data security and privacy

No. BI Helper requests permissions at a user level and not at the organization level. BI Helper can only view the Power BI/Tableau reports accessible to the user who is logged in to BI Helper. Recommended: Create a Power BI/Tableau service account for BI Helper with access limited to the reports which you want to run on BI Helper. Use this service account to run all your BI Helper jobs.

Yes, all your credentials are secure with BI Helper. We have implemented security safeguards in BI Helper including data encryption, virtual network, Multi-Factor Authentication, detailed alerting and logging. For more details, see BI Helper Information Security Guide.

No, your Power BI (Microsoft OAuth2 token) and Tableau API tokens are encrypted and stored in the application database. They are not human readable when stored.

BI Helper operates within the security framework of your organization. You can control BI Helper’s access to your BI environment exactly like you control the access of any other employee.

Yes, BI Helper integrates with Multi-Factor Authentication. No manual intervention is required to run your jobs to generate and email your PDFs.

We recommend the following security and access setup for your reports:
1. Create a new Power BI/Tableau account for your reports and limit its access to the reports which you want to distribute as PDFs using BI Helper.
2. Do not allow the new Power BI/Tableau user account to access any other IT resources of your organization.
3. Enable Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for your account and let BI Helper login using MFA.

Advanced features

Yes, BI Helper has an automated input mode to fetch filter / slicer contacts and recipient email IDs from your Power BI data model/Tableau reports. This is documented in Slicer and Filter Setup | BI Helper.

BI Helper provides error alerts and reporting at the level of each PDF, i.e., for each filter / slicer + email combination. During and after job execution, you can see how many PDFs were generated, how many failed and which ones failed. You can also see the execution history of the last 15 job runs.

No, BI Helper doesn’t support pagination. BI Helper takes a snapshot of your report tabs from Power BI Service, so it does not support vertical and horizontal scrolling of visuals. However, our Premium license allows you to export table and matrix visuals as Excel files, and send them as email attachments along with the PDFs. These Excel exports are filtered by the selected slicer / filter values and support full scrolling.