The Printix Power BI solution Template is designed to give you insights into your Print usage and contains visualizations of data regarding users, workstation, printers, print queues and much more.
This solution contains multiple key components;
- A Power BI solution Template.
- A set of PowerPoint design templates and icons.
The most simple usage of this Power BI template consists of opening it and analyzing your Printix data in PowerBI Desktop on your own machine. Further, you can decide to publish it to your organization's online Power BI service in order to share the report with other users (or even guests), embed visuals into your application, etc.
A demo of the Printix solution template can be viewed here.
To start using the Printix Power BI solution, follow the steps described in the Printix Administrator Manual:
- Setup Printix Analytics
- Setup Power BI
- (Optional) Publish the report to Power BI Service (To publish the Power BI report, you will need a Power BI Pro license.)
Read more about what you can find in the report here.
Note: When you change the "Display Currency" parameter, you will have to manually refresh the whole report. Just clicking "apply" in the report is not enough.
It's impossible to actually calculate the total cost of printer environment, as there is loads of variables that's not tracked by Printix, such as direct print. But, we can try to calculate cost based on what's being printed through Printix.
To allow anyone to define their own cost for different variables you must provide some input the first time you set up the report:
- Sheets Per Tree
- The number of sheets created from a single tree
- Cost Per Mono Sheet
- Cost per page, printed in black and white
- Cost Per Color Sheet
- Cost per page, printed with colors
- Cost Per Sheet
- Cost per sheet printed
- Display Currency
- Which currency would you like to display for all cost related columns
From there, it's quite simple; Based on actually printed jobs (Jobs table) we calculate the cost the following way:
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Sheet cost
- This takes into consideration if the job is duplex or not, and multiples the sum of pages with the cost per sheet.
Code:
SWITCH( TRUE (); jobs[duplex] = TRUE(); ROUNDUP(jobs[page_count] / 2;0 ) * sum('Cost Per Sheet'[Cost Per Sheet]); jobs[duplex] = FALSE(); (jobs[page_count] * SUM('Cost Per Sheet'[Cost Per Sheet]) ) + 0) -
Cost per page, printed in black and white
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If the job is printed in black and white, it will multiple the number of pages with the toner cost BW
Code:
SWITCH( TRUE (); jobs[color] = TRUE(); 0 ; jobs[color] = FALSE(); (jobs[page_count] * SUM('Cost Per Mono Sheet'[Cost Per Mono Sheet]) ) + 0)
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-
Cost per page, printed in color
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If the job is printed in color, it will multiple the number of pages with the toner cost color
Code:
SWITCH( TRUE (); jobs[color] = TRUE(); 0 ; jobs[color] = FALSE(); (jobs[page_count] * SUM('Cost Per Mono Sheet'[Cost Per Mono Sheet]) ) + 0)
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Total cost
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Sums all of the previously mentioned calculations to display the total cost per job.
Code:
Total_Cost = jobs[Sheet_Cost] + jobs[Toner_Cost_BW] + jobs[Toner_Cost_Color]
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For all 4 of these calculations, there is another column with the same name but with " (Currency formatted)" appended to it. These columns look's at the formatting of the selected display currency and make's the sum much more user friendly. It's these columns that's used for all the graphics.
Note; Merging the calculation and the formatting into a single measure has turned out to cause severe performance issues with larger datasets and should be avoided.
You can freely alter the Power BI template as needed for your organization. If you create something awesome, we hope you will share it back with the community! Please remember that the report is shared under the GPL-3.0 license.
The Power BI design is created in PowerPoint and can easily be edited. You can find the design under the "PowerPoint" folder. The design is mostly built using Storyboards.
When you have altered the design in PowerPoint, and exported the slides as "PNGs", you can set them as background images in Power BI. This is done from the "Visualizations" view. Remember to set the "image fit" selector to "fit". The Images from PowerPoint is saved under the 'Images\PowerPoint' directory.
The theme for the report is branded with the same style as https://printix.net. You can create your own report themes by following Microsoft's official guide.
The included theme is a great start for a customized template and is found under the themes folder.
There are some tables that are filled with static data and they are not coming from an outside source. For example: Currency_List, ReleaseInformation, etc.
The content of these static tables are Base64 encoded and compressed as a string. To change the content of these tables, you have to modify this string in the Power Query Editor view in the "Source" step in Applied Steps list.
To decode and encode this string you can use an online converter like: https://jgraph.github.io/drawio-tools/tools/convert.html
Set "URL Encode" to disabled. Set "Deflate" and "Base64" checkboxes to enabled.
Use the Encode and Decode buttons.
Before saving the template for commiting, ensure that:
- The demo SQL server and database are set (printix-bi-data-2.database.windows.net; printix_bi_data_2_1)
- The Date filter (in the right upper corner of the reports) is set to the widest interval as possible (no date limit)