Forum Discussion
Subscription with Excel Attachement
- Hi there
Unfortunately you cannot currently attach an Excel file as you could do with SSRS!!
Unfortunately you cannot currently attach an Excel file as you could do with SSRS!!
- I am not 100% sure that this can be done currently.
Found this option using Flow which is close enough to what I neeed
Creating CSV file with FlowTest went OK, still waiting to see if I get the link to the file by email.
- Let us know how it goes?
According to link below, this feature is not available yet. Seems like MS is prioritizing this for Paginated reports (which requires premium subscription) and then through PowerBI reports at some point I guess.
But depending on your scenario and what resources you have available at your disposal there's a workaround. In my case, the customers really needed to get the report as an Excel attachment. And the report was basically made up of a large table in PowerBI. Customers didn't want to go through the agony of having to open the report and click export to Excel :).
The workaround was actually outside of PowerBI (that's why I say depending on your resources). Here are the steps to roughly get this done:
- Create a Data Flow in SSIS
- Source pacakge contains the SQL code to fetch the required data from the datawarehouse on SQL Server
- Destination package basically writes the results of the query to an Excel file
- Use the Send Email Task in SSIS to deliver the Excel as an attachment
- The last step requires that you have an smtp email account configured in your SQL Server
- Deploy the SSIS flow to the IS Catalog on your server
- Set up a job in SQL Server agent and put it on a scheudule to execute your package from IS Catalog
This is probably not ideal in most cases but depending on the conditions it may be the best alternative at this time.
https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/e-mail-subscription-time-based-scheduling-now-available/
- Create a Data Flow in SSIS