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Category: Visualization

The Great Custom Visual Move

Published 2017-07-31 by Kevin Feasel

Ginger Grant runs into a problem with some of the custom visuals (not) in the Office Store:

This week I decided to do a demo using the Aquarium custom visual.  As readers of my blog know, I have used the custom visual before, but it has been a while and I have changed PCs since then.  No worries I can always go download the visual from the store, right? Wrong. The aquarium visual is not available on the new store. Neither is Image Viewer, if one is looking to add that into your latest Power BI report it is not available. What happened?

Read on to learn why the aquarium is missing.  RIP aquarium (hopefully only temporarily).

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Maps In Power BI

Published 2017-07-21 by Kevin Feasel

Reid Havens shows off the different map visuals within Power BI:

ArcGIS Map

The most recent addition to the Power BI Map family. It’s supported by a company called Esri, and is a very feature rich map visual! What makes this visual stand out is that you can overlay whatever data you have with public geographical data such as demographics, weather, and even historical data. It’s highly customizable and offers multiple ways to visualize data with maps, and that’s even before you start adding the public data sets! Can you tell that I like this visual a lot? Because I do! visualize data with maps

Now I could easily spend an entire blog post JUST outlining all the ways to use this visual, but I’ll stick to the highlight reel. It can visualize data with maps using the bubble or fill method similar to the other map visuals, albiet with a few more customizations and tweaks. However, one of the unique features of this visual is the heat map option! Any of you familiar with Power Maps in Excel has probably seen this before…well now we have it in Power BI. I find this data visualization super useful in identifying data clustering based on location.

Read on for additional varieties of maps you can create.  I personally think the bubble map is ugly and that one map with pie charts (thankfully not shown in Reid’s post) is hideous, but there are some very good map visuals available to us.

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Plotly And Power BI

Published 2017-07-10 by Kevin Feasel

Leila Etaati shows how to use Plotly to generate interactive R charts in Power BI:

In the last two posts (Part 1 and 2), I have explained the main process of creating the R custom Visual Packages in Power BI. there are some parts that still need improvement which I will do in next posts. In this post, I am going to show different R charts that can be used in power BI and when we should used them for what type of data, these are Facet jitter chart, Pie chart, Polar Scatter Chart, Multiple Box Plot, and Column Width Chart. I follow the same process I did in Post 1 and Post 2. I just change the R scripts  and will explain how to use these graphs

Leila includes several examples of chart types and shows that it’s pretty easy to get this working.

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R’s iGraph + SQL Server Graphs

Published 2017-07-07 by Kevin Feasel

Dennes Torres has a post which shows how to use R’s iGraph library to visualize graphs created in SQL Server 2017:

The possibility to use both technologies together is very interesting. Using graph objects we can store relationships between elements, for example, relationships between forum members. Using R scripts we can build a cluster graph from the stored graph information, illustrating the relationships in the graph.

The script below creates a database for our example with a subset of the objects used in my article and a few more relationship records between the forum members.

Click through for the script.

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Bar Plot Alternatives

Published 2017-06-29 by Kevin Feasel

Alboukadel Kassambara shows off a couple alternatives to bar charts:

Cleveland’s dot plot

Color y text by groups. Use y.text.col = TRUE.

ggdotchart(dfm, x = "name", y = "mpg",
           color = "cyl",                                # Color by groups
           palette = c("#00AFBB", "#E7B800", "#FC4E07"), # Custom color palette
           sorting = "descending",                       # Sort value in descending order
           rotate = TRUE,                                # Rotate vertically
           dot.size = 2,                                 # Large dot size
           y.text.col = TRUE,                            # Color y text by groups
           ggtheme = theme_pubr()                        # ggplot2 theme
           )+
  theme_cleveland()                                      # Add dashed grids

I like the lollipop chart example.

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Rotating Tiles Custom Visual

Published 2017-06-21 by Kevin Feasel

Devin Knight continues his Power BI custom visuals series:

In this module you will learn how to use the Rotating Tile Custom Visual.  The Rotating Tile gives you the ability to display multiple metrics on a single visual that rotates through each value you wish to display.  This allows you to save valuable space on your reports!

This feels like the type of thing that works on a dashboard but would get frustrating if you used it for time-sensitive data or data which required thoughtful analysis.

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Great Circles In R

Published 2017-06-16 by Kevin Feasel

Yan Holtz shows how to draw great circles using an R package called geosphere:

This post explains how to draw connection lines between several localizations on a map, using R. The method proposed here relies on the use of the gcIntermediate function from the geosphere package. Instead of making straight lines, it offers to draw the shortest routes, using great circles. A special care is given for situations where cities are very far from each other and where the shortest connection thus passes behind the map.

Now we know how to make pretty-looking global route charts.

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