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Open Source Visualizations

May 11, 2023 - by

Open Source Visualizations

You've been stuck with the same 73 chart types in Excel for two decades. You won't have that problem in Power BI. The product is open source - developers can invent and design new visualizations. You can download the visualization and add it to your dashboard.

The URL for custom visualizations has changed frequently, so simply do a search for Power BI Custom Visualizations. You should find yourself at a gallery of free visuals that you can download. Microsoft has promised to add a new visual every week.

Here are a few of the options as of November 2016:

Some custom visualizations include Liquid Fill Guage, Sparkline, Bowtie Chart, Brick Chart, Hierarchy Slicer, Circular Guage, Donut Chart
Figure 1114. Open Source means you don't have to wait for Microsoft to add your visualization type.

To use one of these visualizations, click on it in the browser. You will see information about the author, the release date, links to support, and a button to download the visual.

A bubble chart encodes the data in area of circles.
Figure 1115. When you download the visual, you will get a .PBIViz file.

Download the visual. A warning will appear that the visual does not come from Microsoft. Read the license rules and then download. A *.pbiviz file will download.

Back in Power BI, click the Elipsis near the visualization types. Browse to the PBIVIZ file you just downloaded and import the visual.

In the visualizations panel, the three dots icon lets you import a visualization from a file.
Figure 1116. Import a custom visualization.

The visualization will appear in the list.

After adding the Bubble custom visual, it appears as an icon in the Visualizations panel.
Figure 1117. The icon for the custom visualization

The author of the visualization specified that you can provide a Category and a Role DisplayName Values. While those might be unusual titles, guess that Customer goes in the top field and Revenue goes in the bottom field.

The chart will show larger circles for large customers and smaller circles for small customers.

The largest customers get the largest bubbles. The small customers fill in the gaps between the large bubbles.
Figure 1118. It takes less than five minutes to find, download, and add a new visualization.

Click on the South Region column in one chart and the new Bubble chart will be filtered to show only the South region customers.

Click on the South region column in the chart, and the Bubble Chart updates to only show the five customers in the South region.
Figure 1119. Click on one chart to filter the other charts.

To turn off this behavior, go to the Format Tools tab in the Ribbon and use Edit Interactions.

A Report Can Have Multiple Pages

Look at the bottom of the Power BI Desktop screen. You can see that you are working on Page1. Right-click the tab to rename it. Click the + tab to add a second sheet to the Report.

Similar to how Sheet1 appears in Excel, the first tab in Power BI Desktop is Page 1. A tab with a Plus sign is to the right and lets you insert a new sheet.
Figure 1120. Just like a workbook can have multiple sheets, a report can have multiple pages.

This article is an excerpt from Power Excel With MrExcel

Title photo by Katerina Pavlyuchkova on Unsplash