All You Need to Know About Power BI Visuals

When creating or editing a  report, you can use many different types of Power BI visuals. The article ahead focuses on these visuals which help you create live and interactive reports and dashboards on Power BI. Topics Covered in this article:

• Introduction
• Custom BI Visual Files
• Organizational Visuals
• Marketplace Visuals
• Pitfalls and Limitations

Introduction to Power BI Visuals

These visuals come pre-installed as a package when you download the  Power BI  Software and the icons for these visuals appear in the Visualization pane as shown below.

But these visuals are not what you are limited to. Selecting the option of the ellipses(…) at the bottom of the pane enables another source of visuals to become available –Power BI visuals.

Power BI Developers create these visuals using the Power BI SDK. These visualizations enable business users to see their data from the perception of their business. Reports can then be imported with custom visual files which, then, can be filtered, highlighted, edited, shared, etc.

Visuals in Power BI are deployed in the following ways:

1. Custom Visual files
2. Organizational Visuals
3. Marketplace Visuals

Custom BI Visual Files

Power BI visuals, basically, are packages that include code for rendering the data served to them. Anybody can build a Power BI custom visual and package it as .pbiviza file. Then, that can then be imported into a Power BI report.

How To Import a Custom Visual from a File

1. Select the icon depicted by ellipses(…) from the bottom of the Visualizations pane.
2. A drop-down shall appear before you. Go aheaad and select Import from file option.
3. From the Open file menu, select the .pbiviz file that you want to import. Select the Open option. The custom visual’s icon shall be added to the bottom of your visualizations pane and be available for use in your report.

Organizational Visuals

Power BI administrators and other such professionals approve and deploy Power BI visuals into their organization. The report authors can easily discover, update, and use these visualizations and admins can easily manage the same.

How to Import organizational visuals

1. Select the ellipses(…)  option from the bottom of the pane. A drop-down will appear before you.
2. Select the option, Import from marketplace.
3. Select the option, MY ORGANIZATION  which appears on the top of the tab.
4. Scroll down and navigate through the list to find the visual you want to import.
5. Select the Add  option.

Marketplace Visuals

Members of the community and Microsoft, both, have contributed their Power BI visuals for the interest of the public on the AppSource marketplace. This is a marketplace where you can find apps, add-ins, and extensions for your Microsoft software and add them to your Power BI reports. These visuals have been tested and approved for efficiency and quality.

Download or import Power BI visuals from Microsoft AppSource

You have two options for downloading and importing Power BI visuals: from within Power BI and from the AppSource website.

How To Import Power BI visuals from within Power BI

1. Select the ellipses from the bottom of the Visualizations pane.
2. From the dropdown, select Import from the marketplace.
3. Scroll through the list to find the visual to import. On the detail page, you can view screenshots, videos, detailed descriptions.
4. Select the option Add to import the custom visual. now available for use in your report.

How To Download and import Power BI visuals from Microsoft AppSource

1. You begin with the Microsoft AppSource and select the option for Apps.
2. Go to the results page. Here you can view the top apps in each category. So, select on the left navigation select your choice of Power BI visuals.
3. The AppSource displays a tile for each custom visual. Each tile has a custom visual snapshot with a brief description and a download link of the same.
4. Select the option Get it now to download the custom visual and check the option to agree to the Terms of use.

5. Go ahead and select the link to download the custom visual. The Download Page also includes instructions on how to import the custom visual into Power BI Desktop and the Power BI service.

6. Save the .pbiviz file and then open Power BI.

7. Import the .pbiviz file into your Power BI report.

You can refer to this video curated by our expert for a more in-depth explanation.

Pitfalls and Limitations

Custom visuals are added to specific reports when imported. If you would wish to use the viz in another report, you need to import it there as well. When a report which has a custom visual is saved using the Save As option. A copy of the custom visual is saved with the new report.

If you don’t see a Visualization Pane in your report, it means you don’t have report edit permissions. You can only add BI visuals to those reports which you can edit and not the ones that have only been shared with you.

With this, we come to the end of this article. I hope you got an idea of visuals in Power BI.

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