Of course if you really think about what these tools are for – printing is no the intent. They are best used to produce dynamic data visualisations viewed within the applications – if you embrace that and change the mind-set then you won’t miss printing at all.

I exchanged notes with Microsoft on the “reader” concept. While there are no plans to invest in “reader” features as Microsoft has given Desktop for free, Microsoft has promised desktop printing. In fact, in the wish discussion thread at https://bit.ly/2raq0fD, Microsoft said “Print has risen to the #1 ask from the community and we are taking it as such. We have cleared some significant technical challenges that blocked the implementation and we can now start addressing it. It is not a simple feature but we are committed to deliver it by summer.”

I guess this will share the same code base with Print to PDF in Power BI Service (also targeting Summer 2018).

all companies are after profit, let’s not forget the removal of sharing from the free tier :(,
competition is good for users, I wish that Tableau step up it game, specially the data modeling, if only they add a proper dimensional modeling !!

Precisely. Microsoft BI has its problems but somehow I don’t think that these two features are missing on purpose to prevent report consumption. If they were after profit, they would come with a “reader” 😉 to limit features.

I voted for both ideas, but I suspect, it is not a bug but a deliberate decision, the business model is clear, the designer is free, but any convenient consumption of the reports has to be done either in the paid service or PowerBI report server.

again, it is not a complain, I am grateful that we have the PBI desktop, taking screenshot is a small inconvenience for a free product.

I see. Yes, printing is long overdue. I see that print to PDF is planned for June for Power BI Service and Embedded. I hope it makes it to Power BI Desktop. It’s one of the most voted features (https://ideas.powerbi.com/forums/265200-power-bi-ideas/suggestions/10003632-print-option-from-power-bi-desktop). Might want to report “Lock Objects” on save as a bug. It should be preserved on save. Vote for it also here (https://ideas.powerbi.com/forums/265200-power-bi-ideas/suggestions/32218330-allow-save-the-lock-objects-option-for-each-proj).

for the record, although my company use Tableau, I use PowerBI desktop :), my manager see a PDF and that’s all what he care about.

the reason distributing pbix is not an option is the lack of printing, it is a showstopper, and PowerBI desktop has no viewer mode for example locking object does not save, the view mode is only available in the service, it is not a complain,Microsoft has to make a living somehow.

so Tableau viewer is a better option because it is read only and designed for that purpose. it is not about security, it is making the experience usable for end user.

Thanks for the feedback. Help me understand this better. I’m sure you know that Power BI Desktop is free and you can distribute *.pbix to any user for free. So file sharing is free with both Power BI Desktop and Tableau Reader. Do you see then Tableau Reader being a better option because it doesn’t allow the recipient to make changes to the content? Of course, if the recipient has Tableau Desktop they can open the file and change it any way they want so you don’t use Tableau Reader as a security feature, right? If the above is correct, I’m not sure why having a free tool that lets you change the content is worse than having a feature-limited “reader”.

In tableau ecosystem, you need only one license of Tableau desktop, once the dashboard is done, you simply distribute the file to any numbers of users, they can open filter interact and most importantly print. we can’t do this with PowerBI desktop, because it is designed to be an editor not as a standalone BI solution.

and yes data modelling in Tableau is very limited compared to PowerBI or even Qlik for that matter, but we can always use different approach, like blending or simply creating a large Fact table with all the dimensions, even with different angularities.