To kick off July, we’ve dropped the latest update to Power BI Report Builder in the download center. It includes, for the first time, the ability to connect to your Power BI datasets, whether or not they are backed by premium capacity. This means any Power BI Pro user can connect to and author, render and export reports locally against her or his Power BI datasets with Power BI Report Builder.

NOTE: For report authors that have been using the XMLA endpoint to connect to Power BI datasets, that functionality will continue to be available, though we expect most authors will use the new workflow we’re announcing here today.

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To start authoring reports against your Power BI dataset, you’ll need to create a new connection to it in your paginated report. You can create a new connection by right-clicking on the Data Sources folder and choosing “Add Power BI Dataset Connection”, or selecting this same option from the “New” drop-down menu in your left-hand toolbar.

Once selected, you’ll need to authenticate to the Power BI service. Then you’ll be presented with a dialog where you can browse all of the workspaces you have access to, along with the Power BI datasets inside each of them.

Please note that you currently won’t see any datasets that are using a Live Connection to Analysis Services. You may connect to those directly using the underlying Analysis Services connection for that instead. We also don’t yet show the tags for certified datasets in the UI, but we’ll have that available later this month in another update.

You can search inside a selected workspace by using the Search box and typing the name of the dataset you’re looking for.

To connect, simply select the name of the Power BI dataset and hit the Select button. You’ll now see a connection under your Data Sources folder with the name of the workspace and dataset you are connected to. Keep in mind that you may connect to multiple Power BI datasets, along with other supported data sources, in the same report. For example, in the picture below I am connected to a Power BI dataset and an “Enter Data” data source.

Once you’ve made your connection(s), you’re ready to start creating your paginated report. If you’ve never created a paginated report before, make sure you read the tutorial in the documentation on how to get started – Tutorial: Create a paginated report and upload it to the Power BI service

Though we don’t yet have support to publish Paginated Reports back to non-premium Power BI workspaces in the service, we are still encouraging all Power BI authors to download and use Power BI Report Builder and take advantage of the capabilities the tool offers locally.

NOTE: As the service side functionality is still rolling out, you may need to wait up to 24 hours before you can publish any reports you’ve created with Power BI datasets back to the service .

We’re excited to see what you think of this latest update, so please make sure to leave your feedback in the comments below. Thanks!