trailsbi 1.0.1

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_{* Power BI is a trademark of Microsoft. TrailsBI is not affiliated with or endorsed by Microsoft.}

Trails for Power BI

TrailsBI reads a Power BI project saved as PBIP (TMDL and PBIR files) and builds one self-contained HTML page you can open in any browser. It runs entirely on your machine: no sign-in, no upload, no telemetry.

Everything about your Reports and Semantic Models

Lineage - Follow any field from source to visual

• Pick a column or measure and see every data source, table and measure it depends on, in navy.
• Everything built on it, down to the visuals and pages, lights up in teal.
• Compact cards for the whole picture, detailed cards with usage counts when you need them.

Model - Every table, column, measure and relationship	Reports - What each page and visual actually uses
Health - Best Practice Analyzer, without the setup	AI Readiness - How well Copilot will understand the model

Get started

1. In Power BI Desktop, save your report as a Power BI project: File > Save as > Power BI project (.pbip).

2. Install TrailsBI (Python 3.9 or later, no other dependencies):

   pip install trailsbi
   

   Or

   uv tool install trailsbi
   

3. Run it on your project:

   trailsbi "D:\Reports\Sales\Sales.pbip"
   

   This writes TrailsBI Report - Sales - 2026-10-04 16-47.html (with the current date and time) to the current folder. Open it in any browser.

Options:

trailsbi [PROJECT] [-o OUTPUT] [--open]

  PROJECT       a .pbip file, the folder that holds it, or a .Report folder
                (default: the current folder, so `trailsbi` alone works inside a project)
  -o, --output  where to write the page: a file name, or a folder for the default name
                (default: "TrailsBI Report - <project> - <date time>.html" here)
  --open        open the page in your browser when it is ready

TrailsBI builds one project per run. To cover several reports, run it once for each.

Single file

Each release also has trailsbi.pyz, the whole tool in one file: python trailsbi.pyz "D:\Reports\Sales".

Common Installation Issues

1. Windows: "'trailsbi' is not recognized"

When Python comes from the Microsoft Store or the Python install manager, pip puts the trailsbi command in a Scripts folder that is not on your PATH. pip warns about it during the install, and running trailsbi "pbip-project-path" returns 'trailsbi' is not recognized.

Fix:

• Add that Scripts folder to your own PATH once. Setup

Privacy and security

• Reads metadata files only. Never opens cache.abf or any imported data.
• Makes no network calls and sends no telemetry.
• Read-only: never writes to your project files.
• The page is one HTML file with no external scripts, fonts or images.

See SECURITY.md for details.

Develop

git clone https://github.com/trailsbi/trailsbi
cd trailsbi
python -m pip install -e . pytest "ruff==0.16.10"
python -m pytest
ruff check . && ruff format --check .

CONTRIBUTING.md explains how the code is laid out.

Licence

Apache License 2.0. See LICENSE and NOTICE.

Trademarks

Power BI is a trademark of Microsoft. TrailsBI is not affiliated with or endorsed by Microsoft.