Power BI visuals in Word: every route, from free to enterprise
There is no "Export to Word" button for a regular Power BI report. Microsoft's export API
for Power BI reports supports .pptx, .pdf and .png and nothing else, and it needs Premium,
Embedded or Fabric capacity.1 So everyone who needs Power BI
visuals inside a written Word document ends up on one of the routes below. This page lists
all of them, including the free ones and including the ones that are cheaper or better than
ours. Prices and quotes carry a source and the date we read the page. Where a page blocked
our tools, we say so instead of guessing.
Two questions decide which route fits you:
Do you need Word, or would PowerPoint or PDF do?
Do you need one document per customer, department or region (report
bursting), or one document at a time?
The twelve routes at a glance
Detail, prices and sources per route are below the table.
Scroll the table sideways to see every column.
Prices are the vendor figures we read on 31 August 2026 and 1 September 2026. The
full source and date is listed with each route. Green marks the answer that is favourable
for a buyer on a Pro licence, including for our own row.
Nothing beyond your existing licence, and the tenant setting "Copy and paste visuals"
being on.
Does
Copies a report visual or dashboard tile as a static image with a caption, which
Microsoft says you can paste into "Microsoft OneNote, Word, Outlook, or any other
application that supports pasting images".
Does not
Scale. Microsoft lists visual types that are not or only partly supported for copying,
including ESRI and other map visuals, Python visuals, R visuals, Power Apps visuals,
slicers and visuals that use the Filter API, licensed visuals, uncertified custom
visuals, AppSource visuals from the organizational store, visuals with applied themes and
colours, freshly pinned dashboard tiles, and visuals with personal bookmarks. Table
visuals are truncated when their content falls outside the visible area, and a
sensitivity label produces a warning and ends up in the metadata under the pasted visual.
A report maker can also switch the copy icon off per visual, and an administrator can
switch the tenant setting off for everyone.
Pick it when
You need a handful of images, once. This is the honest default and most people should
start here.
The tenant setting "Export reports as PowerPoint presentations or PDF documents" to be
on.
Does
Produces a fixed copy of the report pages.
Does not
Produce Word. On the Fabric Community, the answer to "Power BI export to Microsoft
Word" is that there is no direct option and that the route is to export to PDF and
convert that through a third party. A vendor writing about this problem puts the cost
plainly: "The process of exporting to PDF can take minutes, which is frustrating when you
have to repeat the process daily", and "Once you've converted your data into a PDF, it's
no longer dynamic".
Pick it when
A PDF is actually acceptable and nobody needs to write around the visuals.
For regular Power BI reports, the exportToFile API, and therefore capacity. Microsoft:
"The report you're exporting must reside in a workspace backed by a Premium, Embedded, or
Fabric capacity", and "Exporting a Power BI report to a file using the exportToFile API
is not supported for Premium Per User (PPU)".
Does
Bursting, in the sense of looping over a list of customers, applying a filter per
iteration and mailing the result. Filtering works through report level filters and
bookmarks, and row level security through an effective identity.
Does not
Produce Word for regular Power BI reports, because the format list is .pptx, .pdf and
.png only. Limits: at most 50 exports per job, at most 500 concurrent requests per
capacity, 250 MB per file, five pages processed at a time.
Pick it when
You already have capacity and PDF or PowerPoint is fine.
Free in licence terms, expensive in build time and in capacity.
Requires
Capacity again. The paginated export API supports .docx, but "Premium, Embedded or
Fabric capacity" is required, and with PPU the API allows one request per five minutes;
throttling is 250 requests per minute, or 25 per minute with a service principal profile.
Data-driven distribution through dynamic per recipient subscriptions needs Premium
capacity, a Fabric trial or Fabric capacity, with at most 1,000 recipients per
subscription, a 10 minute timeout and attachments under 25 MB.
Does
Produce real .docx. Microsoft: "The Word rendering extension renders Power BI paginated
reports to the Microsoft Word format (.docx)."
Does not
Use the visuals from your existing report. A paginated report is a separate,
table-oriented artefact that you build in Report Builder. It is not a way to get the
charts from a regular Power BI report into a document.
Pick it when
You have capacity, your output is tabular, and you can afford to rebuild the
report.
99.99 euro per user per year; 399.49 euro for 5 users; 999.49 euro for 20 users.
Requires
Office 2016 or later, Windows 10 or later, .NET Framework 4.6.2 and the Visual C++
runtime. The licence is tied to CPU, motherboard and machine name and can be deactivated
to move.
Does
An Office add-in that puts Power BI and Fabric reports into PowerPoint, Word and
Outlook. This is the closest thing to a direct competitor for the Word part. There is a
free trial, functionally identical apart from "the presence of a watermark on every
embedded report and dashboard".
Does not
Bursting. It is a manual insert action from inside Office, not a batch generator.
Pick it when
One person assembles one document at a time and wants to stay inside Office. At 99.99
euro per user per year this is the cheapest paid route to Word, and if you do not need
bursting you should probably buy it instead of ours.
Not public. UpSlide states: "The price of UpSlide depends on the number of licenses you
require, the options you want and your setup model", and "Minimum 5 licenses".
Requires
Microsoft 365, and every user of the Power BI Link needs Power BI Pro or Premium.
Does
A Power BI to PowerPoint and Word Link inside a broader Microsoft 365 add-in suite for
finance teams.
Does not
Publish a price, or sell to a single user.
Pick it when
You are a finance team of at least five people and buying a suite, not a tool.
Starter 1,249 USD per month, billed annually, with 10,000 sync updates per year and
unlimited users. Premium and Enterprise pricing is not public. Free trial of one
week.
Requires
A cloud connection to your Power BI tenant.
Does
The full job, including Word: it connects Power BI to PowerPoint, Word, Google Slides
and Google Docs, with scheduled refresh, version history and email delivery, and its
templates feature produces variants "across various granularities like departments or
clients", which is bursting. The company raised 11 million USD in a Series A led by
Insight Partners, announced 18 October 2024.
Does not
Fit a budget under roughly 15,000 USD per year, and it is a cloud service, so your
report content passes through their platform.
Pick it when
This is a company-wide programme with a company-wide budget.
Per year in USD, minimum one year, paid in advance, no refunds: 6,995 up to 200 peak
outputs; 8,995 up to 1,000 outputs; 12,995 unlimited; 17,940 unlimited with 2 instances;
35,880 unlimited with unlimited instances.
Requires
A Windows server in your own environment: "PBRS is installed on a Windows server in
your environment". Licensed per server installation, unlimited users, 10 concurrent web
users.
Does
Scheduling and distribution for Power BI, paginated reports and SSRS, with explicit
support for "Power BI report bursting": one report, hundreds of recipient-specific
versions, with dynamic filters.
Word, honestly unresolved
The product page lists PDF, Excel, CSV, HTML and images and does not mention Word.
Their knowledge base has an article titled "How do I use PBRS to export Power BI Reports
& Dashboards, Paginated Reports or SSRS reports to MS Word format?", but that page
returned HTTP 404 when we tried to read it, so we cannot confirm whether Word works for
regular Power BI reports or only for paginated and SSRS reports. Ask them before you
buy.
Pick it when
You want on-premises scheduling across Power BI and SSRS and the budget is
enterprise-sized.
Standard 1,199 euro per year, Premium 1,699 euro per year, with unlimited schedules,
unlimited recipients and 5 hours of support included. A later read of the same page showed
1,099 euro for one user including 5 hours of maintenance, so check the vendor page for the
current figure.
Requires
A web app for configuration plus a Windows Service Agent on your own
infrastructure.
Does
Scheduled delivery of Power BI reports and visuals with per-recipient filters ("apply
filters to reports and customize their content for specific recipients or groups"), output
as PDF, Excel, high resolution images and a slideshow. Free to use with a red watermark on
all images and PDFs.
Does not
Word.
Pick it when
You need scheduled PDF and image delivery per recipient and Word is not part of the
deliverable.
Per month in USD: Standard 50 for 300 files plus 0.12 per extra file; Premium 100 for
500 plus 0.20; Enterprise 500 for 1,500 plus 0.35. Prepaid: 200 for 500 files, valid 15
days. Trial of 7 days without a credit card.
Requires
A SaaS connection. It works without Power Automate.
Does
Bursting, including reading the dimension values out of Power BI itself and CSV upload,
producing filtered PDFs and PPTX files and mailing them.
Does not
Word or DOCX.
Pick it when
You need bursting without capacity and PDF is fine.
99 euro one time, per user, including twelve months of updates. After that the version
you have keeps working. Free trial with a watermark, no time limit, no credit card.
Requires
Windows, a Power BI Pro licence, the Azure CLI or the Power BI PowerShell module from
Microsoft, Microsoft Edge (already on Windows 11), and one hidden print page added to
your report.
Does
Captures the visuals you pick from your own report and writes them into your own Word
template, one document per value of a dimension (customer, department, region), filtered
by a period. It runs on your PC: the report opens under your own licence, and the
captures and documents stay in a folder on your machine. No app registration, no service
principal, no admin consent, no Fabric capacity.
Does not
Power BI Report Server; scheduling; email delivery; PDF; values or tables pulled from
the model as text; repeated sections inside one document; macOS. It stops if your tenant
has "Copy and paste visuals" turned off, and a Conditional Access policy that requires a
compliant or hybrid joined device will block the sign in.
Pick it when
You write the same Word document for many customers, departments or regions every
period, you are on a Pro licence with no capacity, and nobody is going to approve a
four-figure annual contract.
People arrive at this page searching for "an NPrinting alternative for Power BI", so it is
worth being clear. NPrinting is a product of Qlik, and the name is a Qlik trademark. It
generates and distributes reports for QlikView and Qlik Sense, with templates in Word,
Excel, PowerPoint, PDF and HTML and distribution per recipient. It is not a Power BI
product. Qlik publishes no price list; community answers point to a reseller or account
manager. The February 2025 release is supported until 18 February 2027, and NPrinting does
not run on Qlik Cloud. Reportfold is an alternative to Qlik NPrinting for Power BI in one
respect only: the same document, filtered per recipient, in a Word file. It does not
replace NPrinting's scheduling, distribution or its Excel and PowerPoint templates, and it
has nothing to do with Qlik.
If you need a few images once, use Power BI's own copy as image feature, which is free, or
export to PDF if a fixed copy is enough. If you need Word for one document at a time and
you are inside Office anyway, PowerBI Tiles Pro at 99.99 euro per user per year is the
cheapest paid route, and UpSlide is the suite version of the same idea for teams of five or
more. If you need the same document filtered per customer, department or region, your
choice is capacity plus paginated reports, an enterprise platform such as Rollstack or
PBRS, or Reportfold if you want to stay on a Pro licence and pay once.
Transparency
Reportfold is built by Kolkworks, a small Dutch studio, with AI agents doing the
engineering under human direction. We sell one of the products on this page, so read the
comparison with that in mind: every price and quote above carries a link, so you can check
it yourself.
Prices change. If you find a figure on this page that no longer
matches the vendor's own page, write to
support@kolkworks.com and we will correct it.
The Microsoft export API limits quoted in the introduction come from Export Power BI report
to file,
learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/developer/embedded/export-to
(consulted 31 August 2026).