Mark Vaillancourt shows how to run an R script inside Power BI Desktop:
All of the options I will show require you to have R installed on your machine. I am using R version 3.4.3 I got here as well as R Studio (an IDE: Integrated Scripting Environment) version 1.1.383 I obtained here. You can also use Microsoft R Open, which you can get here. All are free. I am choosing base R and R Studio because I want to play with/show the use of non-Microsoft tools in conjunction with Microsoft tools. I am using 2.53.4954.481 64-bit (December 2017) of Power BI Desktop. Note that things could look/behave differently in other version of Power BI Desktop.
For this post, I am using a well-known dataset known as the Iris dataset, which you can read about here. I downloaded the zip file from here to obtain a csv file of the data set for one of my examples. The Iris dataset is also included in the “datasets” package in R Studio, which I will use as well.
Note: A key R concept to understand is that of a data frame, which is essentially just data in a tabular format. In a data frame, the “columns” are actually called “variables.”
Once you have R and an R IDE installed, Power BI Desktop will detect them. You can see this in the Power BI Desktop Options.
Mark shows you step by step using some snazzy SnagIt imagery.
Comments closed