Report Builder: Word Rendering Does Not 'Keep Together'

[Ochrese]

I am generating a report using Power BI Report Builder and exporting to Word. My data is in a table and within this I have a row group and its contents marked as KeepTogether=True. But when exported the Word Render doesn't respect this and the instances of groups can be split across pages.

How do I get this to behave as I want?

If I render to PDF I get exactly the format I am expecting with with group and its contents on a single page. This format isn't any use to me because I need editable output so the report can be included as part of a larger document. Hence exporting to Word.

It seems to be because the Word renderer is a 'Soft Page' paginator. Which seems to mean in reality that it generates Word documents as if there are no pages unless you force a page break. Whereas PDF rendering does real 'Hard Pages'. This seems mad, there must be someway to generate content for a Word document that actually formats well across pages boundaries?

[Anonymous]

Hi @Ochrese ,

It seems you’re encountering an issue where the ‘KeepTogether’ property in Power BI Report Builder is not being respected when exporting to Word. This is because the Word renderer is a ‘Soft Page’ paginator, which means it generates Word documents as if there are no pages unless you force a page break. 

One workaround that you could try is to manually insert page breaks in your report where you want to ensure that a group and its contents stay together. To do this, you can add a rectangle to your report and set its PageBreak property to "Start". Then, place your group and its contents inside the rectangle. This should force the Word renderer to treat the rectangle as a separate page and keep the group and its contents together.

Another option is that you could try exporting your report to Word and then manually adjusting the layout to ensure that groups and their contents stay together on the same page.

Best Regards