After I created this documentation I did find that it is possible to use the Atom data feed to create a Power View report using that feed and then take advantage of the native PowerPoint export that is built into Power View. There is some documentation on this on TechNet, but this option requires SharePoint 2010 Enterprise with SSRS in integrated mode and Excel 2013 to put it all together. There are also some capabilities in Word/PowerPoint to embed Objects that reference the SSRS reports, but this is very similar to the LiveWeb option and I had a bunch of issues getting it work on my test system, so I chose not to mention it in the options below.
If you have found any other ways to get SSRS reports exported to PowerPoint, please post in the comments below and share it! There is a Microsoft Connect ticket that was created back in 2007 to add PowerPoint as a native export that is still active, if you want to see if we can get it added make sure to vote it up!
Summary
|
|
Aspose.Slides
|
LiveWeb
|
Custom Renderer
|
SSRS Word
|
SSRS Excel
|
SSRS TIFF
|
|
Easy to Install/Configure
|
3
|
3
|
1
|
4
|
4
|
4
|
|
Ease of Upgrading with SSRS
|
3
|
4
|
1
|
4
|
4
|
4
|
|
Report Changes Necessary
|
3
|
3
|
4*
|
4
|
4
|
4
|
|
Pages on Separate Slides
|
4
|
0
|
4*
|
1
|
0
|
2
|
|
Cost+
|
0
|
4
|
0
|
2
|
2
|
2
|
|
Average
|
2
|
3
|
2
|
3
|
3
|
3
|
|
Total
|
13
|
14
|
10
|
15
|
14
|
16
|
* Assuming renderer includes all
capabilities
+ Lower rating when there is a cost
($ and/or man hours) separate from existing SSRS license
3rd Party
SSRS Rendering Extensions
There are 2 possibilities that I
found for this option, Aspose.Slides and LiveWeb. Aspose.Slides is a full SSRS
rendering extension that works with all current versions of SSRS and adds
multiple formats of PowerPoint export to ReportViewer (as shown in screenshot
below):
Aspose.Slides supports all types of
reports (tables, matrix, charts, graphs, etc.) that can be built in SSRS and
will work with Report Builder. Some formatting of the reports will need to be
taken into consideration to paginate properly in the PowerPoint exports, not
that different than what has to be thought about for PDF export (make sure to
setup landscape, margins, etc.). The install is very easy and for most installs
does everything automatically even with multiple instances on the same
computer. There is a cost associated with this as it is provided by Aspose, it is hard to tell which pricing
structure will work best as is depends on the number of
developers and servers they would plan to roll it out on. This
page on Aspose’s site shows the pricing at a high level. This is the only
option that will provide full PowerPoint export capabilities out of the box
without extra steps.
LiveWeb is a freeware add-on for
PowerPoint that allows you to embed a browser window in any PowerPoint
slide. With this add-on a PowerPoint slide can be setup to point to a specific
report on the SSRS server using the URL access built-in to SSRS to render the
report inside of the slide. Because this is a browser embedded in the slide
there will be no pagination as SSRS when accessed via a browser will assume
that you do not want to see pagination and will make the whole report available
by scrolling up and down in the browser window. This does also provide the
capability to interact with the report within even the PowerPoint when it is in
slide show mode, but if this is just being used to show static slides and each
page is expected to be on a separate slide, this option will not work for that
scenario. The install is very easy and works with all versions of PowerPoint
from 2007 and forward. No changes will be required for the SSRS reports to work
with this add-on.
Build Custom SSRS
Rendering Extension
SSRS was built with the ability to
extend/enhance all parts of the product by writing custom .NET code to do
whatever the user would like if it is not something provided out of the box.
While these extensions to SSRS can be very easy to write for some parts of the
product, it can be extremely difficult for others. I have written a custom
security extension for SSRS in the past and it only took a day or two to fully
code and test. When I researched this for writing a custom rendering extension
(Microsoft considers anything that shows the SSRS report in another form a
renderer, even if it is only for export) the MSDN article
specifically states that it is difficult and “requires you to implement
hundreds of classes, interfaces, methods, and properties.” The other major
issue with writing a custom rendering extension is there is no guarantee that
the extension you write for SSRS 2012 will work with SSRS 2014 or any other
future version as Microsoft is always changing the API for SSRS and those
changes may break what previously worked fine. I saw this first hand with the
security extension that I wrote originally for SSRS 2005, that had to be
re-written for SSRS 2008R2. With custom rendering extensions the code has to
know how to handle anything someone will put into an SSRS report, so that is
what makes it that much more difficult to write. Because these extensions are
written in a .NET language (C# or VB.NET) it will require a full license for
Visual Studio as the BIDS (Business Intelligence Development Studio) and SSDT
(SQL Server Developer Tools) do not include the capabilities to create C# or
VB.NET projects. With Visual Studio 2013 it is possible to use the Express
version that is free for this kind of development.
Use included export
formats (PDF, Word, Excel, CSV, XML, TIFF, HTML)
It is possible to use the export
formats that come with SSRS and still allow them to be shown in PowerPoint.
Most of these options will require multiple steps to complete and may require
manual intervention to complete successfully, but they will not cost anything
extra in dollars to implement. The easiest to setup is using the Word export
that is new with SSRS 2008R2, with this export you can easily copy/paste the
Word version into a PowerPoint deck or even use the embedding of Word documents
directly into PowerPoint (Word exports may have issues with pagination
depending on the report and how it is formatted). With both the Word and Excel exports it would
be possible for SSRS to be setup to automatically export the required reports
to a file share on the network on a pre-defined schedule and then have the
links to those files already setup in the PowerPoint decks and only require
someone to open those decks and refresh them to get the latest version of the
data from the reports. The other export formats supported by SSRS are not very
helpful for embedding in PowerPoint. While it would seem that the TIFF (image)
format would work, as it is just an image and it does generate an image per
page, the issue I found in testing is that PowerPoint does not understand how
to handle multiple pages in a TIFF image when importing it into a slide, so
only the first page is imported. It would be possible to use another
application to separate this single TIFF file by page, but that would be an
extra step/process (freeware Image Magick can do this
split via command line).
