Press "Enter" to skip to content

Choosing a Power BI Report Type

Paul Turley compares Power BI paginated and analytic reports:

This brings me to the subject of this post: Paginated and Analytic reports.

Before we had Power BI, we had Reporting Services. When the focus of my career and consulting practice became Business Intelligence – fifteen to about five years ago – most of the “BI reports” I created were in SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). We could create a variety of charts and reports that allowed users to drill-down from summary to details. We could create reports that allowed a user to drill-through, from one record or report item to another report that presented more details. With a little creativity, we could create reports that allowed users to click items that would filter other items on the same report. It took some work and time to create these interactive “drill-through-to-self” reports. Today, after transforming data into the right format for a tabular data model, this type of interactive functionality just magically happens in Power BI with very little report design effort. But, Power BI is primarily a tool for analyst users to create their own reports and to get answers to business questions rather than for IT developers to create reports that print or export perfectly to a PDF or Excel.

For now, Paul is asking for thoughts and questions with the promise that there will be an update to the post. So stop on by and ask a question or two.