Reading Time: 4 minutes Microsoft’s Power BI [Paginated] Report Builder is the newly rebranded version of the venerable SQL Server Report Builder. These static reports have been around for years, but there’s still some room for innovation. For example, Power BI allows designers to import custom visuals into Desktop reports to enrich them beyond the default visual options. What…
Reading Time: 1 minute The Funnel Bar (FUBAR) Chart for Power BI is a new concept that combines the versatility and inherent trustworthiness of the bar chart with the unpredictability of Power BI’s funnel visual. Why do people use funnels? It is well-established tradition that sales reports include visuals where an axis (usually the Y axis) has bars that…
Reading Time: 2 minutes One of the Power BI improvements in the March 2019 Desktop release was reduced bubble size for the Map visual. I previously wrote about the benefit of the reduction in point/bubble size. I was unaware until recently that this change made it into more than the Map visual. The ability to reduce the point size…
Reading Time: 5 minutes Displaying customers within a given distance radius on a Power BI map was one of my recent challenges. Report consumers would need to be able to make a location selection and see which other points were in the same vicinity. Here’s a sample report that aligns closely with the requirements: My first inclination was…
Reading Time: 3 minutes One of the first things I tried in Power BI Desktop (née Designer) in late 2014 and early 2015 was the Map visual. Power BI’s mapping capabilities were spartan compared to other tools I was using at the time such as Excel, Reporting Services, Tableau, and Leaflet. I wanted Power BI to do everything that…
Reading Time: 1 minute Charticulator is the first item that I mention in my recent Power BI Best of 2018 in Data Visualization post. It’s an exciting new tool from Microsoft Research to quickly build advanced visuals. Best of all, you can export charts as Power BI custom visuals without knowing how to code. This morning, I submitted a pull request on…
Reading Time: 5 minutes Power BI is not so much a data visualization tool as it is an end-to-end business intelligence platform that ends with visualizing data. Marco Russo approached this well when he explained the differences between a more robust model-based tool and a narrowly scoped report-based tool. While visualizing data in Power BI may sometimes be a bit…
Reading Time: 2 minutes Makeover Monday is a weekly social effort to help everyone in the data visualization community. Working primarily from data.world and tweeting with the hashtag #MakeoverMonday, this community strives to steadily improve the quality of data analysis and visualization at the individual and community level. There’s even a new book that grew out of the weekly…
Reading Time: 3 minutes Microsoft recently updated the R version for Power BI Service and installed numerous additional R packages. For comparison, I posted the then-current list of packages back in July 2017. If you use R in Power BI Service, definitely see what’s available in the screenshots at the end of this post. Hopefully the Power BI documentation…
Reading Time: 2 minutes Anyone who remembers the original Power BI Custom Visual Gallery may recall seeing a visual called the Hexbin Scatterplot. It was the first visual that I created after Microsoft enabled custom visual development. When Microsoft deprecated the original dev tools and released the current API, all of the original visuals had to be rewritten in order…