Solution: “An error occurred while attempting to save the report to Power BI Report Server”

Symptoms

Did you recently download a newer version of Power BI Desktop (optimized for Report Server)? The latest is August 2018 as of the writing of this post. If you’ve downloaded August and are trying to save to an outdated version of Report Server via the client application, it’ll give you this error message.

“An error occurred while attempting to save the report to Power BI Report Server.”

And you can try going to Power BI Report Server via your browser and uploading there directly, but you’ll get this error message which is more helpful:

“We can’t save this Power BI Desktop report because either it is newer version or has component parts that are not supported.”

Cause

This error occurs when users are trying to save a report from a Power BI Desktop version that’s newer than the version of Power BI Report Server installed on your server.

Solution

Upgrade your Power BI Report Server version to the latest available to make sure it’s compatible with users using the latest version of Power BI Desktop available. It will be backwards-compatible in case you have users still on October 2017 or March 2018.

1. Log in to the server that hosts your Power BI Report Server
2. Download the latest version of Power BI Report Server
   1. Go to https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/report-server/
   2. Click “Advanced download options”
      
   3. Select your language and click “Download”
      
   4. Check the box next to “PowerBIReportServer.exe” and “Next”
      
3. Run the downloaded .exe file and click “Upgrade Power BI Report Server”
   
4. Follow the prompts, and reboot the server when finished. This will cause a short amount of downtime.

You should now be able to access and save reports from/to the server as usual from all versions of Power BI Desktop.