Making the "Old" New

I talk with a lot of people about whether their organization uses custom visuals in Power BI. Their answers often vary quite a bit. There are a lot of great custom visuals we can tap into from the Microsoft Power BI AppSource store, like maps (Mapbox is one of my favorites), radar charts, and Visio diagrams.

However, there are some cases for avoiding using custom visuals as well. They're often not maintained in the same way that standard visuals are. Some of them are Microsoft developed and/or certified, but that's more than often not the case. There are also concerns about increasing the scope of Power BI administration. In recent years, there's almost become a standalone role for managing an organization's Power BI account because there's so much to do between security, managing access, managing reports and dashboards, and managing data refreshes. And this task never gets smaller - the amount of effort per report might decrease over time, but the overall size and number of assets in the Power BI account (whether that's Report Server or Pro/Premium) will certainly never decrease.

A lot of organizations don’t use the latest version of Power BI either. For example, Power BI Report Server, which supports Power BI models in an on-premises server, uses Power BI Desktop versions that lag Premium and Pro updates by roughly three months.

Thus, there's absolutely an incentive for trying to use standard visuals in new ways to get around this obstacle. Now let's explore some ways to do that!

Gantt Charts

If you work in project management (or have in a previous role), you'll know that Gantt charts are often the cornerstone of keeping an eye on tasks to be done and those already in the completed stage. Here’s one way to create a Gantt chart using the standard Power BI stacked bar chart data visualization.

Star Reviews

If you look at reviews for restaurants or hotels (to name a few examples), there's often a numeric score (typically out of a five) plus a star rating with filled stars. We can create something very similar in Power BI! There's both a quick measure that we can tap into, and we can set it up ourselves if we're looking for a bit more customization.

Budget Lines

If you work in an accounting office or even just review budget reports, you'll likely recognize the need for adding reference lines for the budgets in comparison to the bars representing the actual numbers for both revenue and expenses.

Free Courses!

Until June 23rd, these courses are free as part of the LinkedIn initiative of 100 AI courses for free for 100 days! I’m honored to have three courses in this collection along with many other instructions that I greatly admire.

AI in Power BI

If you hear about AI models but aren’t quite sure how to integrate them into Power BI, this course shows how to do that without writing any R or Python code (it does include some DAX code though)! This course covers examples of algorithms and visuals like anomaly detection, forecasting, outlier detection, and clustering.

Logistic Regression

Logistic regression is an algorithm that's helpful for predicting an outcome of an activity like fraud detection, sports, or gambling. We often see logistic regression visualized as line charts with S-shaped curves going between two outcomes on the y-axis.

Data Reduction

Check out clustering algorithms like hierarchical clustering and KMeans in this course! It also talks about PCA (Principal Components Analysis).

Coming Up!

Here's a sneak peak of what I'm working on right now...

LinkedIn Learning Courses

Stay tuned for some exciting news about upcoming courses that I’m working on for LinkedIn Learning. I also share my latest Power BI Weekly video every week when it comes out on Thursday as posts.

Data Fundamentals

Next week I’m a guest on the Data Fundamentals Unpacked (LinkedIn Live) session with Gini von Courter, Robin Hunt, and Bill Shander. We’ll be discussing coding and programming languages in the data space. Check out event details below!

Houston Power BI User Group

For those in the Houston area, we’ll be having the Power BI user group meetup at the Microsoft offices (City Centre area) on Tuesday, June 27th. We’ll share more details on the meeting soon!

-HW