Recently I attended an excellent session by Andy Kirk on the state of data visualization for 2019. One of the tools Andy is most excited about is called Charticulator. For those of you that haven’t heard about it, Charticulator is an open source project from Microsoft Research. Using a web UI you can design almost any charts by interactively specifying constraints (NO code).

The best news is that you can use these visuals directly in Power BI. You can even use your own data coming from the PBI data model. This came as news for many at Andy Kirk’s session so decided to do a quick post on it. Building very custom charts entices a lot of data artists but it is often hard to bring this to main stream BI product. The ease of the Charticulator and Power BI integration brings this type of data visualizations to a much broader audience.

An example of the web ui (available here) below shows how to build one. You can find many more and how to build them in the gallery here.

Some of the samples from the gallery show you the wide variety of visuals you can create with it:

or

and

Now the best news for us is that you can easily export the visual you create to Power BI as Power BI custom visual. Leila has a great video on how to do this here.

So next time you need to create a custom visual for this special customer you can whip open charticulator, create a visual and use it in your Power BI project.

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Kasper On BI