Tag Archives: Visuals
Sisense and Adobe: Custom Analytics + Custom Visuals
We’re stronger when we work together. In our Partner Showcase, we highlight the amazing integrations, joint projects, and new functionalities developed with companies like Adobe and others.
You didn’t become a product developer to leave your dreams and visions half-realized. When it comes to building amazing apps, design matters. The Sisense data and analytics platform already gives you unparalleled flexibility when it comes to what you can do with your data as you embed insights into your product. Now, enhanced integration with two heavy-hitter Adobe Creative Cloud programs, XD and Photoshop, takes your ability to create and deploy custom visuals to new heights.
Design reigns supreme
It’s not just enough for your app to employ data and analytics in interesting, compelling ways, it also needs to look great. App design (visual style, UI, UX, etc.) has undergone rapid evolution in the past decade. Consumers want a smooth, easy-to-navigate experience and they also want your app to look great. Plus, your friends in the marketing department want your app’s style to perfectly match your brand guidelines — especially when embedding third-party analytics like Sisense into your product.
Branding matters! Whether they are cognizant of this or not, your users know your brand. Your colors and font choices are integral to your brand’s conception in your audience’s mind. When deploying analytics and data elements into your product, you need to match your look and feel.
The right integrations allow you to take this further, blending your branding needs with custom visuals. Whether you want an interactive animated visual or a custom image to go in your dashboard, Adobe XD and Photoshop can help you create it. Adobe has set the industry standard for beautiful design and our integration empowers product teams to work with their design colleagues to turn beautiful concepts into functional reality.
Sisense + Adobe XD: Vibrant, versatile vectors
The Sisense data and analytics platform is built to differentiate the analytics/dashboards you’re providing to your end-users. Rebuilt from the ground up for cloud-native architecture, wherever your data lives and whatever insights you want to present to your users, you can do it with Sisense.
But what about custom vector visuals that go beyond the usual Sisense range of options? With the Sisense plugin for Adobe XD, if your designers can imagine it, you can implement it. Custom animated visuals, like this thermometer, add a dynamic element that will delight users and convey usable information in a compelling way:
Representing data in interesting, consumable ways gives users a faster, more engaging way to understand data. It also gives product developers like you a way to create more beautiful analytic apps and truly bring your wildest ideas to life. (Tech aficionados will appreciate that the plugin was rewritten from scratch using React and features SVG Export to control whether code is minified; read more here!)
Sisense + Photoshop: Beautiful, functional bitmaps
Photoshop is one of the most vital programs in the modern design world. Sisense and Adobe have taken our collaboration to the next level with the release of the Sisense plugin for Photoshop, which lets you put custom Photoshop visuals into your Sisense embedded analytics deployment.
Simply put, whatever you and your product team can dream up, you can have a designer with Photoshop skills put together. Then you bring your beautiful, functional imagery into Sisense. That’s right, you’re not just dressing up normal Sisense insights with fancy pictures; the Sisense plugin for Adobe Photoshop provides advanced automation to update graphics and text on dashboards in real-time. Changes to the content are controlled in Adobe Photoshop and automatically reflected on Sisense dashboards. Take a look at what customers can already do with it:
Breaking down silos; building better products
The unparalleled custom imagery you can now create inside your analytic apps with Sisense’s plugins for Adobe XD and Adobe Photoshop is a game-changing leap forward for product teams and design teams alike.
For starters, it breaks down the imaginary walls between these two teams, allowing more people in the organization to build analytics, as designers can now easily create widgets that will live inside the embedded Sisense analytics. It also integrates designers into the process of creating analytics for end-users, instead of keeping them at a distance or using their skills piecemeal.
These plugins also remove friction when building analytics and dashboards: The diverse teams building your embedded analytics can share and collaborate on images, graphics, and the analytics functionality itself all during the same process. The result is a better product, faster!
Your users will love your new creations too. Creating fun, interactive designs is the perfect way to reduce chart/data overload. Again: Design reigns supreme! Users demand fun, easy-to-use, beautiful experiences. A better user experience also translates to increased stickiness and user satisfaction (and in the long run more revenue!).
The math is simple: (Sisense + Adobe) * (Builders + Designers) = better, more beautiful insights for all.
To install the Sisense plugin for Photoshop visit our listing on the Adobe marketplace and learn more about the steps to install here. To install the Sisense plugin for XD click on this link and read the Sisense support documentation here. Go forth and build boldly and beautifully!
Lio Fleishman is the Partnership Solutions Engineer at Sisense and is passionate about JavaScript and front-end engineering tools. He is obsessed with making the way engineers do their jobs easier and better every day.
1/17/2019 Webinar: Updates for Developing Custom Visuals for Power BI by Ted Pattison
In this week’s webinar Ted Pattison will be covering how to develop Custom Visuals for Power BI.
Power BI has supported the development of custom visuals since its initial release. However, the custom visuals platform has been constantly evolving and has recently been updated to support dynamic module loading which makes it possible to develop custom visual for Power BI using the latest versions of D3.js including D3 version 5. Join Ted and Chuck as they discuss the current state of the custom visual platform and explain how you how to take advantage of the most recent enhancements.
When 1/17/2019 10AM PST
Deep dive in the organizational custom visuals
Custom visuals bring great value to your organization. By using tailor-made visuals, enterprises can tell their own story and visualize data in the best way!
It is not a bar chart, and it is not a line chart, it is a custom visual that tells your data story!
See the Engine diagnostics summary report for a major airline. This report shows the use of custom visualizations designed for the airline industry.
For the full report go to: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/industries/airline/
Where can I find those visuals?
Hundreds of ready-made custom visuals can be found from our online marketplace or built in store.
Can I build my own custom visuals?
Absolutely! In some organizations custom visuals are even more important – they might be necessary to convey specific data or insights unique to the organization, they may have special data requirements, or they may highlight private business methods.
Such organizations need to develop their own custom visuals, using the Power BI opensource custom visuals framework. Alternatively, use plenty of advanced examples and ready-made samples to build their own.
We have a vibrant developer community that shares ideas and are involved in technical discussions with our great support team.
They can also find a consultancy service offered by one of our partners. Where organizations can get the custom visuals implemented and designed only for their own use.
Such organizations want to share those private visuals throughout their organization, and make sure they are properly maintained and delivered to everyone in the organization.
Power BI organizational custom visuals let organizations do just that.
How can organizational custom visuals help an organization manage its own visuals?
The Power BI administrator manages and deploys the organizational custom visuals through the admin portal.
To upload an organization visual to the organizational store the Power BI admin should click on “Add a custom visual”, fill out the needed information and upload the required files.
For instance:
Once deployed into the organizational repository, users in the organization can easily discover them, and import the organizational custom visuals into their reports directly from Power BI Desktop or Service.
How can the admin manage those visuals?
In the Admin portal, under the "Organizational custom visuals" tab the admin can see and manage all the organizational custom visuals in the enterprise: add, disable, enable and delete.
There is no need to share those visuals by emails or shared folder anymore!
Once the admin uploaded a new organizational custom visual’s version everyone in the organization gets the same updated version. Report authors do not need to delete the visual in their reports to get the new version of these visuals as all reports using these visuals will be automatically updated!
The update mechanism is similar to the marketplace visuals.
Where can report authors find the organizational custom visuals?
Organizational custom visuals are easily accessed from the built-in store, under "MY ORGANIZATION", from both Power BI Desktop and Service.
Report authors will have to log-in even if they are using the Power BI Desktop. Otherwise they will not be able to access the organizational store.
Users in the organization can use those visuals in their reports as any other visuals.
If for any reason the Admin decided to disable a visual from the organizational store, they can do so through the Admin portal. By selecting the setting gear of that specific visual and disable it under "Access".
Once disabled, the visual will immediately stop rendering in existing reports in both Power BI Desktop and Service. And will display the following error message:
In our example users in the organization will not be able to use the private ChicletSlicer visual from the private store. All private ChicletSilcer visuals in existing reports will display the above error message.
At the same time report authors see only the private Tachometer visual in the organizational store both in desktop and service as the private ChicletSlicer visual was disabled by the Power BI admin.
Note here that the Admin only had to disable the selected visual from the Admin Portal and it was automatically disabled to everyone in the organization!
In the same way, Admin can delete entirely an organizational visual.
End users using the deleted visual in existing reports will also get an error.
Wait… There are some more questions…
If the administrator uploads a custom visual from the public marketplace to the organizational store will it be automatically updated once the vendor updates the visual in the public marketplace?
No, there is no automatic update from the public marketplace.
It is the Admin's responsibility to update the organizational custom visuals' version if desired.
Is there a way to disable the organizational store?
No, users will always see the "MY ORGANIZATION" tab from the Power BI desktop and service. Admin can disable or delete all organizational custom visuals from the admin portal and the organizational store will simply be empty.
If the administrator disables custom visuals from the Admin portal (Tenant settings) will users still have access to the organizational custom visuals?
Yes, if the admin disables the custom visuals from the admin portal that will not affect the organizational store. In fact, that is one of the organizational store use-cases, some organization disable custom visuals and enables only hand-picked visuals that were imported and uploaded by the Power BI administrator to the organizational store.
Note that disabling the custom visuals from the Admin portal is not enforced in Power BI Desktop. Desktop users will still be able to add and use custom visuals from the public marketplace to their reports. However, those public custom visuals will stop rendering once published to Power BI Service and will issue appropriate error.
Users using Power BI Service, though, will not be able to import custom visuals from the public marketplace but only visuals from the organizational store. That is because the custom visuals setting in the admin portal is enforced in the Service.
To sum up, why organizational store and organizational custom visuals is a great enterprise solution?
- Everyone gets the same visual version which is controlled by the Power BI administrator. Once the admin updates the visual's version in the admin portal, all the users in the organization get the updated version automatically.
- No need to share visual files by email or shared folders anymore!
- One place, visible to all members who are logged-in.
- Security and supportability, new versions of organizational custom visuals are updated automatically in all reports similar to marketplace visuals.
- Users in the organization using the organizational custom visuals needs to be logged-in to see and use the organizational custom visuals which is a security element for organization.
- Admins can control which custom visuals to be available in the organization.
- Admins can enable/disable visuals for testing from the admin portal
- Better security enforcement as those visuals will be allowed for organizational members only.
What is the organizational custom visuals limitation?
- Legacy custom visuals (such as custom visuals that are not built on top of the new versioned APIs) are not supported.
- Visio visual, PowerApps visual, Mapbox, and the GlobeMap visual from AppSource marketplace will not render if deployed through the organization repository.
- Organizational custom visuals are private visuals imported from the organization repository. As any private visual they can not be exported to PowerPoint or displayed in emails received when a user subscribes to report pages. Only certified custom visuals imported directly from the marketplace support these features.
Is there any more documentation to read?
Yes, of course.
Using organizational custom visuals in Power BI
Admin Portal – Manage organizational custom visuals
For any technical question please reach out to pbicvsupport@microsoft.com
5/29 Webinar: Building Spectacular Power BI Dashboards with Zebra BI visuals
During Matt Allington’s webinar: Time intelligence for retail and wholesale industries with Power BI the request was made to have a webinar on the best practices for visualizing business data particularly Time On Time like YOY changes. Next week we have Andreje from Zebra BI to come show how many of the internal teams at Microsoft are doing this with Zebra BI visuals.
Building Spectacular Power BI Dashboards with Zebra BI visuals
We will present advanced data visualization methods for building insightful Power BI dashboards. This lecture will demonstrate how to implement popular datavis techniques like the small multiples and the IBCS® semantic notation by using the Zebra BI custom visuals. We’ll also take on the challenge of presenting the P&L statements in Power BI.
In our presentation, we will build a real-life sales and financial dashboard from the scratch and reveal practical tips&tricks for designing advanced, mobile ready and fully responsive dashboards.
When: May 29th 2018 10AM PST
Where: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3Dh6aBOO7A
About the Presenter: Andrej Lapajne
Andrej Lapajne is the founder of Zebra BI and a founding member of the IBCS Association. In his 20 years of experience as a consultant, Andrej has implemented reporting systems and BI dashboards across a wide range of industries including pharma, telco, retail, FMCG, manufacturing, insurance, banking, energy, media, public sector and the high tech industry. His experience includes helping Coca-Cola bottlers, Swarovski, Bayer, Roche, Danfoss and many other international companies achieve consistent and efficient reporting.
In the last 5 years, Andrej has led the Zebra BI team in developing fully IBCS-compliant custom visuals for Power BI as well as the popular Zebra BI Excel Add-In.
As a speaker, Andrej has lectured at McKinsey&Co. in NYC, the AFP Annual Conference in Denver, several IBCS annual conferences and at many other international conferences and events. He is a guest lecturer at Faculties of Economics and Computer Science and Informatics in Ljubljana.
Excel announces new data visualization capabilities with Power BI custom visuals
Custom visuals have become a key part of Power BI allowing users to tap into hundreds of different visualizations. It is hard to believe that a little over two years ago we announced the availability of the first batch of custom visuals in Power BI Desktop and the Power BI Service. But custom visuals go far beyond the world of Power BI users. Today, as part of Build, we announced that Power BI Custom Visuals will be rolling out in Preview to Office 365 subscribers enrolled in the Office Insiders program soon, extending Excel charting capabilities and more than doubling the data visualization options for the most widely used data analytics tool in the world.
Developers around the world are able to extend Power BI through visuals using the Power BI developer tools, the Power BI Visuals repo and standard Open Source technologies, like JavaScript and D3. This highlights Power BI’s commitment to user driven innovation and listening to feedback from our users and community.
Amir Netz, Technical Fellow and Chief Architect of Power BI, said in 2015, “I believe this one new capability [custom visuals] trumps all of the features released … Why? Because with custom visuals we are simply blowing past every limit of what is possible in data visualization and business intelligence.” As of today, more than 150 visuals are available in AppSource ranging from Infographics to R powered visuals that do not require R code at all!
Developers will now be able to reach millions of users with their own custom visuals while current Power BI developers will be able to reach a wider audience.
Here are some of the benefits that custom visuals will bring to Excel users and developers:
-
Insertion Experience side-by-side with existing charts
-
Tailored and Familiar Store
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Intuitive and Familiar UI Controls within Excel
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Enterprise Ready support for in house organizational visuals
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Develop once and make available to users on both Excel and Power BI
Finally, this announcement reinforces the benefits that Excel and Power BI users get from using both tools together in the context of Office 365.
Learn more about this announcement in the Office Dev Center blog.
Resources
Move or Resize #PowerBI visuals with the arrowkeys
Move or Resize #PowerBI visuals with the arrowkeys
You might already know that you can move one selected visual with the arrow key – one point and if you hold down the SHIFT key it will move 8 or 9 pts when you click the arrow key.
See this example – move the visual with the arrow keys
But can you also resize multiple visuals !!!
Until today I didn’t think it was possible to resize visuals using the arrow keys – but it can be done – and even when you select the more than one of the same type of visuals.
So, if you want to make all your cards or bar chart – you can simply select them and then switch to the Format tab of the visual – under General you will find the width and height of the selected visuals.
You can enter new values OR use the magic of the arrow keys !!!!!!! – if you use Arrow up or down you can actually change the number 1 point at a time
Check out this video
This will naturally also make your visuals exactly the same size.
It will save me and hopefully also you a lot of mouse clicks in alignment and resizing.
Dynamically switching axis on visuals with Power BI
An interesting visualization pattern I have seen is that some customers want to be able to switch the axis on the chart dynamically using a slicer.
Let’s take a simple model like this:
where I want to be able to dynamically change the axis of my chart to be Currency, Country or Region using a slicer. Today that is not possible out of the box because you cannot have a single slicer crossing different table. Now one option here is to use bookmarks to switch the chart based on a label (but that is cheating 
) but I rather fix it in the model. What we need to do is bring all slicer values and their keys into a single table to be used in the slicer, for this use a DAX calculated table like this:
Table =
var currencyt = CROSSJOIN(ROW("Type","Currency"), VALUES(DimCurrency[CurrencyName]))
var country = CROSSJOIN(ROW("Type","Country"), VALUES(DimSalesTerritory[SalesTerritoryCountry]))
var region = CROSSJOIN(ROW("Type","Region"), VALUES(DimSalesTerritory[SalesTerritoryRegion]))
return UNION(UNION(currencyt,country), region)
First we use 3 variables to create 3 tables that each joins with the name we want on the slicer with the key values of that dimension. Finally we join all of them into a single table, i also rename the CurrencyName column to Values.
This gives us a single table:
Now we can create a slicer based on the type and create a chart based on the Key column
Now finally I write a measure that joins the names of the axis with the values on the dimension using TREATAS.
Measure 2 =
if(HASONEVALUE('Table'[Type]),
SWITCH(VALUES('Table'[Type])
,"Country", CALCULATE(SUM(FactInternetSales[SalesAmount])
,TREATAS(VALUES('Table'[Values])
,DimSalesTerritory[SalesTerritoryCountry]))
,"Currency",CALCULATE(SUM(FactInternetSales[SalesAmount])
,TREATAS(VALUES('Table'[Values])
,DimCurrency[CurrencyName]))
,"Region",CALCULATE(SUM(FactInternetSales[SalesAmount])
,TREATAS(VALUES('Table'[Values])
,DimSalesTerritory[SalesTerritoryRegion]))
)
)
This calculation pushes the filtered down onto the dimension based on the slicer, it is using the filtered values from the values column into each column of the dimension. This is as if the filter was placed on the dimension instead of the table we just created.
This finally gives us the ability to slice on a dimension:
You can download the PBIX file here.
Interactive R custom visuals support is here!
R is a strong and popular language, enabling developers to create great analytics on data, as well as visualization.
Developers can already create R custom visuals that plugs into Power BI reports, to enable report authors to use those custom visuals without known R. This is a powerful capability to extend the visualizations of Power BI.
We are proud to announce that R custom visuals can now also be interactive, by generating HTML as the visual (instead of the static image that was supported until now), R custom visuals are capable of supporting tooltips and selections.
Here is an example of a time series forecast chart with tooltips, selection and zoom:
We already have interactive R custom visuals in the store. Try them out:
We are working to add more of them soon, and waiting for you, the developers community, to add your own!
The interactivity is enabled thanks to Plotly R library and htmlwidgets library, which are supported in Power BI service and Desktop.
Interested in creating interactive R custom visuals? Learn more.
Need help? check the community site, or contact pbicvsupport@microsoft.com
Check out all R custom visuals in the store.
Get updates and join the developer discussion in the community site.
Custom visuals now available in the Office store
Custom visuals have come a long way since they were announced as part of the GA of Power BI back in July 2015. From best visual contest, to a new and improved version of the platform and the developer tools, to the recent announcement for the new custom visuals community site, it was always about the community.
The community is the force that drives the success of custom visuals. Developers have contributed more and more custom visuals to the visuals gallery, which now has more than 80 visuals! Report creators embraced custom visuals and made some awesome reports. Also, your focus and passion has helped to improve the platform and make custom visuals what they are today. It was heartwarming to see how much you care and enjoy custom visuals! Thank you!
Custom visuals in the Office store
We are very excited to announce, that as of today, custom visuals are available to discover and download within the Office store.
What is the Office store? Simply put – it is the place to find apps (known as add-ins) for your Office 365 software.
The Office Store connects millions of users of Office 365 to solutions that help them get work done more efficiently, more insightfully or more beautifully than before.
What is changing?
Power BI is now a product in the Office store, listing all Power BI custom visuals. Searching and filtering by categories are available for easy navigation.
The custom visuals gallery is moving to the Office store. Many visuals are already listed in the store, and we are working to onboard the rest of the visuals within a few weeks. The Office store will be the place to discover custom visuals and download them, as well as the place for developers to submit and manage their custom visuals in the store.
The visuals gallery will still be available until we finish moving all of the visuals to the Office store, however new submissions will only go to the Office store. All custom visuals that were ever downloaded from the gallery will continue to work as usual even after the gallery will be deprecated.
Better for users
If you use custom visuals, here is what the integration with the Office store will mean to you.
- An easy navigation experience using categories and search. We created a set of categories just for custom visuals.
- A details page for each visual with high quality screenshots and videos to introduce you to the visual.
- Reviews and ratings are available as a feedback channel to the developer and also a way for you to help others gauge quality of a visual.
For more information about how to discover and use custom visuals in the office store, see Download and use custom visuals from the Office store.
Better for developers
For you custom visual developers, you will be able to use the Office developer center which will bring the following.
- Submit your custom visuals in an easy to use web portal.
- Manage your custom visual submissions.
- Track how many people visited your custom visual page in the store and downloaded it.
- Get direct feedback from users through the review system to help you improve the visual.
In addition to that, you will get broader exposure to a larger user base in the Office store.
For more information about how to submit visuals to the Office store, see Publish custom visuals to the Office store.