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Report Builder for creating paginated reports

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Alex Blake on 23 Sep 2021 06:35:50

Microsoft, please listen good because I about had it with your subpar UI/UX design as far as Power BI Report Builder is concerned. The UI is so unintuitive that just to create 2 date filters--a from-date and a to-date--the equivalent of a Date Range slicer in Power BI in order to filter the datetime column of a Fact table from a Power BI model, is about as intuitive as trying to figure out how to fly an alien spaceship!

I was watching the Power BI Paginated Reports in a Day on youtube but that didn't help a bit as there were no explanations as to what the exact sequence of steps should be to achieve the abovementioned, not to mention that all the demos are based on a perfect and idealized case scenario.

Finally, after days and days of searching for something that should take less than 1 min to do, I lucked out and found a write-up explaining exactly how to do it. The sequence of steps is so convoluted that unless you are as mad as the app designers, you don't stand a chance in a million years finding out how to do it just based on intuition nurtured by years of experience. That's how bad it is.

As a comparison and to illustrate the point, let me say that I had never coded in C# my whole life, didn't know jack about C#, never coded a Windows app before, and yet, even though using Visual Studio, I was able to figure out how to slap together a DB client as a Windows Forms app and complete it successfully in 2 days, learning as I was going along.

If I can do that but not figure out how to set up a simple date filter for a report, then something is obviously wrong and it ain't my cognitive ability.

My point: A new user shouldn't have to go through such a grueling process just to get started. Furthermore, such a simple task of setting up a date filter for the report data should be as intuitive as selecting a font style from the ribbon in Word. Anything more involved than this simply smacks of piss-poor UI/UX design.

What you did with SSRS by revamping it as Power BI Report Builder is just smearing lipstick on a pig. In 2021, this just doesn't cut it. Time to leave the Windows 95 days behind. I would hope someone in the SQL Server tools team in Redmond would finally realize that.

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Gary THOMANN on 10 May 2022 07:31:30

RE: Report Builder for creating paginated reports

Right on Brother! You vote for mine I'll vote for yours!