Forum Discussion

Tas's avatar
Tas
Advocate I
9 years ago

Using a Service Dataset as datasource in Power BI Desktop

Since Power BI desktop is limited to a single report for the data source, and there are limits on how many pages in a report you can have if you want to use say publish to power point, is there anywa...
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Phil_Seamark's avatar
Phil_Seamark
Microsoft Employee
9 years ago

Hi Tas,

 

If you are importing data to Power BI and not using Direct Query, you can have many different data sources for the 1 PBIX file.

 

I haven't tested to see how many pages you are allowed but if you have more than 12, it will quickly be an issue for scrolling (which you can partially solve through URL parameters).

 

You can also change the properties of a single page to make it really really long and really really wide (if need)

  • Tas's avatar
    Tas
    Advocate I
    9 years ago

    Thanks Phil_Seamark,

     

    I may not have explained what I need very well. It is kind of the opposite of what you suggest.  I want to have multiple PBIX file all pointing to the one data source, being one already created and published to the service with imported data from SQL.  Now ideally I would do all this in the one PBIX, but you can only have one report, and if you have more than 15 pages, export to PowerPoint won't work, and as you say scrolling becomes a pain.

     

    I know SSAS on prem is one option, but we spent ages previously doing this and found the performance dismal.  With the model in the service, performance us much better, but I would like to only have the one model, and a number of different reports using it.

     

    I know I can create the reports directly in the service, but then they don't respond well to model changes, they just fail if they depend on a measure that has changed name, whereas reports in the PBIX file see changes to the model and adapt.  I also understand that if we were able to use more than one PBIX file pointing to the same model the second and subsequent ones would not adjust to changes in the model, but at least we could divide up the reports and publish them with some form of version control. 

     

    All said, I am looking at ways to improve the development life cycle of Power BI based reporting, but am struggling to setup something that is not fragile or overly painful to manage.