topic Re: Automating PDF Export of Dashboard for Each Slicer Option in Developer

Automating PDF Export of Dashboard for Each Slicer Option

JoeCrozier — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 14:49:13 GMT

I feel like this might be similar in a sense to this question, but hopefully even more basic.

I’ve got a dashboard that looks like this:

It works great—my end users are happy with it. There’s a slicer for Protocol No, with about 30 different options. Selecting one updates the visuals across the page.

Now, my users want to receive a static PDF version of the report every week, with one page per Protocol No. Basically, they want the equivalent of me manually selecting each slicer option, taking a screenshot, and repeating 30 times—then compiling those into a single PDF and sending it.

My first idea was to recreate the dashboard in a paginated report, but that turned into a beast with subreports and performance issues—it was effectively running 100+ reports per export. Not ideal.

I also suggested embedding the Power BI dashboard in a PowerPoint file and exporting that, but they really want it to be static PDF format.

I know Power BI supports subscriptions, but as far as I can tell, you’d have to create and manage 30 individual subscriptions, one per Protocol, and manually update them whenever a new Protocol is added.

So… am I missing an obvious solution here?

Is there a clean or automated way to:

Loop through each Protocol No in the slicer
Render the dashboard with that filter applied
Capture that page into a PDF (or image)
Combine all pages into one file
And email it to someone on a schedule?

Any thoughts or workflows others have used to solve something like this?

Thanks in advance!

Re: Automating PDF Export of Dashboard for Each Slicer Option

lbendlin — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 15:07:50 GMT

This is a nightmare waiting to happen. You could use Power Automate to create individual PDFs , one for each filter. But then you would need to use a commercial tool to combine all PDFs.

Or you could have 30 hidden pages in your PBIX, one for each filter, and then export just those pages via Power Automate.

Push back on the requirement.

Re: Automating PDF Export of Dashboard for Each Slicer Option

Deku — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 15:06:55 GMT

You could create a user group per protocol and do use dynamic subscriptions. Then only need one subscription but apply a different filter per user group.

Re: Automating PDF Export of Dashboard for Each Slicer Option

JoeCrozier — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 15:08:47 GMT

We definitely are. We're meeting later today to discuss. In the meantime i am toying with power automate to export png's and combine those (so I dont need a third party tool to combine pdf's)