Forum Discussion
Doing simple accounting type reports
Anonymous
1). Seems you have mostly excel type reports, or large tabular reports in excel and you distribute or users have access to these reports.
Report Builder/paginated report can fulfill your requirement with dynamic extraction, sharing etc option.Please see this link: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/paginated-reports/paginated-reports-report-builder-power-bi#:~:text=Paginated%20reports%20are%20designed%20to,their%20report%20page%20layout%20exactly.
Please read this thread also for excel solution: https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Desktop/Traditional-Financial-Statements/m-p/7223
2). The type of report you require is paginated report, so report builder is the option, it's free tool, will require premium license to publish it to the workspace, or you can have on-premise report server.
There are automatic way of moving paginated reports published to the workspace to the excel, for e.g subscription where end user will get email as per scheduled date/time. PowerAutomate solution etc.
So basically PowerBI Ecosystem can fullfill your requirement and sometimes you will require to use combination of paginated reports and powerbi report/dashboard.If you have a fairly large budget then go for premium, it can help you to build the enterprise level of reporting system.
Hope above helps. Feel free to share more questions.
Thanks for the quick reply.
You mentioned exporting to Excel, but it is really an export to csv. The main point being this will not give us any formatting from Power BI to Excel, will it?
It seems hard to believe that Power BI reports cannot be exported with formatting to Excel. Or can they?
Thanks again for the post.
Anonymous
At the moment export from powerbi will not have report format.
Paginated report/report builder is the solution at the moment, here you will have excel, word, pdf many other options while exporting.
Here is my quandary: 1.) how to handle the extraction of data in an automated fashion and 2.) how to handle the dissemination of long accounting type reports and how to deal with data that needs to go into Excel reports for formatting and manual manipulation.
As to number 1.) above, management wants to use Power BI to replace all of our reporting. They want to eliminate Cognos which is our main way to automatically extract data and place it into Excel files. This would leave us in the position to have to use Direct Query as we would have no way to automate the generation of Excel or csv files in overnight runs. Or as an alternative, use Excel and data connections to build Excel files for import. But how would you automate these for unattended updating every night?
As to number 2.), I will try the pagination approach once we are fully set up. The export of data to Excel via csv seems less than desirable. We would have to build the Power BI report then turn around and build the Excel report. I can’t believe as long as Power BI has been around that there is no automatic way to move a Power BI report to Excel. Are there any third party products that would do this?
I am beginning to suspect that a Power BI environment, along with associated products, like Desktop Pro and Premium, Power BI Services, Gateway,etc., is not sufficient to be the sole reporting tool we need. I am including in this the various components such as Desktop Pro and Premium, Power BI Services, etc. Please tell me I am wrong.
If you had a fairly large budget, what apps would you buy to serve all of the reporting needs, including overnight automation of data for including in Power BI reports and automated dissemination of PDFs and Excel files after the Power BI report has been updated? Are there any references to building a very powerful, all encompassing Power BI environment to meet all of our reporting needs?
Thanks for all of your replies,
James
Anonymous
1). Seems you have mostly excel type reports, or large tabular reports in excel and you distribute or users have access to these reports.
Report Builder/paginated report can fulfill your requirement with dynamic extraction, sharing etc option.Please see this link: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/paginated-reports/paginated-reports-report-builder-power-bi#:~:text=Paginated%20reports%20are%20designed%20to,their%20report%20page%20layout%20exactly.
Please read this thread also for excel solution: https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Desktop/Traditional-Financial-Statements/m-p/7223
2). The type of report you require is paginated report, so report builder is the option, it's free tool, will require premium license to publish it to the workspace, or you can have on-premise report server.
There are automatic way of moving paginated reports published to the workspace to the excel, for e.g subscription where end user will get email as per scheduled date/time. PowerAutomate solution etc.
So basically PowerBI Ecosystem can fullfill your requirement and sometimes you will require to use combination of paginated reports and powerbi report/dashboard.If you have a fairly large budget then go for premium, it can help you to build the enterprise level of reporting system.
Hope above helps. Feel free to share more questions.
Thanks for the post.
After reading the material, I downloaded Report Builder and played with it some. It does look like the solution we need.
Thanks again.