Forum Discussion
Advocate IIPowerBI Robots - Does Microsoft plan on doing something similar?
There are currently some similar features, Publish to Web, save as PowerPoint and you can subscribe to reports to get a screen shot sent when the data refreshese. Other than that, I am not currently aware of anything that would replicate that functionality. However, I would check the Ideas forum and see what is currently in progress or planned.
Advocate IBobi, I'm not certain from your note how you're approaching this. I'm guessing you're either (1) using the Filters page on the Playlists editors. Or else you have four reports, each of which goes out to 100 reps' email addresses plus yourself.
If it's Filters that you're using, I've never really used this so I can't say.
If it's the second approach -- that you're sending a playlist to a large number of individual emails -- then this approach also caused me rendering problems. I believe the issue is that the Robots tool recreates the report package separately, once for each email recipient. That's a lot of rendering work, and seems to allow for errors to creep in. The way I got around this problem was, we created an email distribution alias, that links to all the desired playlist recipients. I send my multi-visual playlists just to that alias and me. With just those two recipients for the Robots tool to send out the playlist to, we haven't had any further issues.
I will also say that the design of your visuals can matter. Complex, multi-part visuals that render slowly in the power bi service also seem to cause issues with Robots. So you might want to see if there are more efficient ways to design your visuals, if the alias approach doesn't solve the problem.
Hope this helps.
SA
SA,
Thank you for your response. I’ve actually implemented both of your assumptions. I have 100 reps that receive 4 reports tailored to them by using the filter option so that each rep will only see their information. With that said, I’ve increased the “Max Timeout” to 300 max and increased the “Delay Render” option to 50 sec verse 20 seconds in hope that this will help. I might even break up the playlist to only 5 recipient and increase it until the playlist fails. I’ll post my update in the next day or two in hope that I finally get this to work😊.
Bobi
- SA_NYC
Interesting. My thought is that you might want to go all the way to a playlist per individual rep, as annoying as that might be. You can duplicate playlists, as I'm sure you know. That won't save much time but it would help a little bit. Unfortunately you'd have to edit each playlist individually later on if the time period changes, for example, a new financial quarter, and your report doesn't isn't designed to be able to change over automatically. You should send a note to the DevScope support team, I sent them a question early on and they did eventually reply (a couple of weeks later). They've also commented on my posted product improvements on this thread and have implemented some of my thoughts in future product releases. (I imagine they had the ideas themselves, I'm not claiming credit, most of them were obvious, such as the ability to reorder visuals in a playlist.) So actually I would imagine they'll just read your comments on here and perhaps factor into a future release.
Let us know how it goes! If you're able to get where you want to, let me tell you, the Robots product is amazing. I have it humming, and the automated reports I distribute with it are incredibly valuable at our company.
Thank you SA_NYC.
Indeed we read any suggestions to improve our products here in the forums and pass them on to our development team. You can also send me a private message with any questions or suggestions. We're here to help.
Peter_Jeyaraj_IHelper II
Our end objective is to take the print out of the pdf file that we received in eMail via Power bi robots.
PDF/Print output is not in proper format due to the page setup I think. Is it possible, to change the page setup because.
- Report page in pdf file covers only 50-60% of the page and it looks very small/difficult to read the numbers
- Some scenario, we want to split the one report page into two pdf pages ( top contains charts/graphs and bottom of the reports contains table format output)
Also I am getting below error message when I applying any page filter
"Error getting page filters!"
Regards,
Peter I
Hi, Peter.
Our support team informed me that your issue is resolved. Can you confirm it?
Thank you
- Peter_Jeyaraj_I
Yes, i am getting an on-time response from the support team.
Still in the discussion to close out this issue.. thank you