What is Power BI Report Builder?

Power BI Report Builder is a free, standalone application designed for creating paginated reports that you can publish to the Power BI service. Unlike the interactive dashboards you build in Power BI Desktop, these reports are optimized for printing or sharing as a PDF, with a layout that's fixed and pixel-perfect. This article will walk you through what paginated reports are, how Report Builder differs from Power BI Desktop, who it's for, and how you can get started creating your first one.

What Are Paginated Reports, Anyway?

While the name "paginated report" might sound technical, the concept is straightforward. Think of a document designed to be printed or exported, where the data flows perfectly from one page to the next. The layout is static and precisely controlled, much like a traditional report you might create in Microsoft Word or a multi-page PDF.

These are not the dynamic, clickable dashboards you use for data exploration. Instead, a paginated report is what you use when you need an official, formatted document. They are structured with headers, footers, precise margins, and can contain tables and matrices that expand vertically and horizontally across multiple pages, repeating the headers on each page for clarity.

The goal isn't to slice and dice data on a screen, it's to generate a polished, easy-to-read document that contains all the necessary details. Common examples of paginated reports include:

• Invoices: A bill sent to a customer needs to have a fixed, professional layout that looks the same whether it's printed or viewed as a PDF.
• Financial Statements: Reports like a Profit and Loss statement or a balance sheet require a specific, highly structured format that's unsuitable for a dynamic dashboard.
• Detailed Sales Lists: Imagine you need a complete list of every single sale made in the last quarter, neatly organized in a table spanning 50 pages.
• Operational Reports: Think of inventory manifests, shipping labels, employee directories, or patient medical records - all of these require a precise, repeatable layout.
• Official Transcripts: Certificates or academic transcripts must adhere to a strict, pixel-perfect design.

Essentially, any time your primary goal is to print, export to PDF, or generate a formal document from your data, you’re in the territory of paginated reports.

Power BI Report Builder vs. Power BI Desktop: What's the Difference?

One of the most common points of confusion for new Power BI users is understanding when to use Report Builder and when to use Power BI Desktop. They are both part of the Power BI ecosystem but are built for entirely different purposes. Think of them as two different tools in your data analytics toolbox, each designed for a specific job.

Power BI Desktop: For Interactive Exploration

Power BI Desktop is the primary tool for creating the interactive dashboards most people associate with business intelligence. It’s where you go to visualize data, discover insights, and build a story that allows users to explore the data for themselves.

• Purpose: Self-service analytics and data visualization.
• Design Experience: A flexible, drag-and-drop canvas where you arrange visuals like charts, graphs, and cards. The layout is fluid and resizes based on screen dimensions and user interaction.
• User Interaction: Highly interactive. Users can click on charts, apply filters with slicers, and drill down into details to ask and answer their own questions.
• Output: A dynamic report published to the Power BI service, meant to be consumed on a screen.
• Best For: High-level summaries, trend analysis, and helping business users answer "why?" something happened by letting them play with the data.

Power BI Report Builder: For Operational Reporting

Power BI Report Builder is a specialized tool laser-focused on creating static, formatted documents. It's rooted in SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) technology and excels at handling large, detailed tables of data meant for distribution.

• Purpose: Creating paginated, print-friendly reports.
• Design Experience: A more structured, document-style layout. You design a template with a body, header, and footer, and you place data regions (like tables and matrices) into it that will grow based on the underlying data.
• User Interaction: Limited interaction. Users can apply parameters to filter the data before the report is generated (e.g., selecting a date range or a product category), but once created, the report itself is static.
• Output: A pixel-perfect RDL (Report Definition Language) file that can be rendered in the Power BI service and exported to formats like PDF, Word, or Excel.
• Best For: Answering "what happened?" with detailed, formatted lists and tables. Ideal for any situation that requires a formal, printable document.

Who is Power BI Report Builder For?

While a BI developer or data analyst is typically the one building the report, the end-users are usually operational teams throughout the business who need standardized reporting for their day-to-day work. Here are a few examples of who benefits most from paginated reports:

• Finance and Accounting: This is a classic use case. Finance teams need to generate month-end financial statements, variance analysis reports, client invoices, and accounts receivable aging lists. These all require a precise, document-like format that Report Builder delivers perfectly.
• Sales and Operations: Imagine a sales manager who needs a detailed report of every single order placed in their region last month, sorted by salesperson. Or perhaps they need to generate commission statements for each member of their team. These are tasks that demand paginated reports.
• Human Resources: HR departments can use Report Builder to create employee directories, detailed payroll summaries for archival purposes, or required compliance documentation. The ability to generate a multi-page document for each employee is a significant advantage.
• Supply Chain and Manufacturing: Teams in these areas often need to produce inventory lists, bills of materials for specific products, or shipping manifests. These documents must be precise, printable, and easy to read on the warehouse floor.

Key Features of Power BI Report Builder

Report Builder comes with a suite of features specifically designed for crafting detailed reports. Here are some of the core components you’ll work with:

Diverse Data Sources

Report Builder can connect to a wide range of data sources, including Power BI datasets, Power BI dataflows, SQL Server, Azure SQL Database, Oracle, Teradata, and more. A popular and powerful workflow is to connect Report Builder to a curated Power BI dataset that has already been created in Power BI Desktop. This ensures that both your interactive dashboards and your printed reports are built from the same, single source of truth.

Structured Report Layout

The design surface is sectioned into a header, body, and footer. This allows you to easily place elements like logos, report titles, and page numbers that will appear consistently across all pages of your report.

Data Regions

These are the main tools you use to display your data on the report canvas:

• Table: The most basic data region. It displays data in a simple row-and-column format. You define a set number of columns, and the table adds a new row for each record in your dataset.
• Matrix: Similar to a pivot table in Excel. A matrix can have both dynamic rows and dynamic columns. This is perfect for summarizing data, for instance showing sales by region (rows) and by product category (columns).
• List: A free-form data region that repeats a layout you design for each record in a dataset. For example, you could design a block containing a product image, name, and price, and the List region would replicate that block for every product in your inventory.

Parameters

Parameters make your reports more flexible by allowing users to filter the data before it runs. You could add a parameter that lets the user select a date range, pick a specific country from a dropdown list, or choose the salesperson whose data they want to view. This gives a static report an element of user-driven customization.

How to Get Started with Power BI Report Builder

Getting started is simpler than you might think. Report Builder is a free download and doesn't require a professional license to build reports, though you'll need a Pro or Premium license to publish them to a workspace.

Step 1: Download and Install

First, you need to download Power BI Report Builder. It's a completely separate program from Power BI Desktop. You can find it on the official Microsoft Download Center. Once downloaded, the installation is a simple click-through process.

Step 2: Connect to a Data Source

Once you open Report Builder, the first step is to tell it where to get its data. In the Report Data pane on the left, you can right-click on Data Sources and select Add Power BI Dataset Connection or Add Data Source for other types like SQL Server. Let’s stick with a Power BI dataset, as it's a common and efficient workflow.

Step 3: Define a Dataset

After connecting to a data source, you need to create a dataset. This is where you specify exactly which fields you want to pull into your report. Right-click on Datasets and select Add Dataset. You'll see an interface where you can drag and drop measures and columns from your Power BI dataset, similar to creating a pivot table in Excel.

Step 4: Design Your Report Layout

Now for the fun part. From the Insert tab in the ribbon, you can choose a data region like a Table. A wizard will guide you through picking the fields from your dataset and arranging them how you’d like them to appear. For example, you could drag fields like [Customer Name], [Order Date], and [Sales Amount] into the table columns. You can format headers, adjust column widths, and add a grand total in the footer row.

Step 5: Preview, Publish, and Share

As you build, you can click the Run button at any time to switch from design view to preview view. This shows you exactly what your report will look like with live data populated. Once you're happy with the design, you can save the file locally (as an .rdl file) and then publish it directly to a workspace in the Power BI service. From there, users can view the report, export it to PDF, Excel, Word, or other formats, and even set up email subscriptions to receive it on a regular schedule.

Final Thoughts

Power BI Report Builder fills a critical niche in the world of business intelligence. It complements the exploratory, interactive nature of Power BI Desktop by providing the perfect tool for creating pixel-perfect, printable documents. It's the right choice anytime you need to generate formal outputs like invoices, financial statements, or detailed operational logs, where precise formatting and print-readiness are top priorities.

Ultimately, both Report Builder and interactive dashboards are tools an organization uses to get clear, actionable answers from its data. But we know that often the biggest hurdle isn't building the report - it's connecting all your scattered data sources and knowing what questions to ask in the first place. For that challenge, tools that simplify the whole process are a game-changer. We've simplified this by allowing you to connect sources like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Salesforce in seconds, then create real-time dashboards just by asking questions in plain English with Graphed. This cuts through the technical complexity and gets right to the insights, freeing you up to make better decisions faster.