Forum Discussion
Email a weekly Excel report
- 1 year ago
Hi jbrines
Given that you’re working with over 50 SharePoint lists as data sources and plan to use the data within Power BI for additional reporting needs, the most scalable and maintainable approach under your licensing constraints (without Power BI Premium) would be to centralize your data using Power BI Dataflows or a data warehouse (if available). Then, instead of trying to export directly from Power BI, you can use Power Automate to connect to those dataflows or directly to the SharePoint lists, filter for the past week's data, and write that into an Excel file using the “Create Excel file” and “Send email with attachment” actions. This approach bypasses Power BI's export limitations and still delivers the required Excel output on a scheduled basis. While paginated reports are the ideal solution for large exports from Power BI, they require Premium or Fabric capacity. Therefore, leveraging Power Automate to orchestrate data extraction and email delivery from SharePoint (or dataflows) is a practical, no-code workaround that fits within your existing Pro license, preserves the flexibility for Power BI reporting, and avoids the 1,000-row limitation of standard report exports.
Option 1: Excel + Power Query + Power Automate Desktop
- Connect Excel to Power BI dataset using Power Query.
- Apply relative date filter (last 7 days).
- Use Power Automate Desktop to refresh Excel & email weekly.
Option 2: Manual Export from Power BI Desktop
- After dataset refresh, open PBIX file.
- Export table/visual as Excel manually.
- Send via email manually or using Outlook rule.
Option 3: Paginated Report via Report Builder
- Design paginated report to handle full data.
- Export as Excel and email.
- Requires Premium or PPU license
- Ideal for large reports