V is for Vega and Visualizations

I often get asked which tool or language I would recommend for creating data visualizations. Like many responses in the world of technology (and perhaps the world in general as well), the answer is almost always "It depends." That's not to say that I don't have preferences, but my choice often depends on factors outside my control, like where the organization already stores its data, the existing IT infrastructure, and time constraints.

The graphic below shows a few of them and their relationships to one another within an application like Power BI. I've said it before, and I'll say it again because Excel is a great ad hoc tool for so many projects. If you're trying to create visuals for data that's already in an Excel file (or CSV file for that matter), the data visualization capabilities of Excel continue to impress me!

At first, it can seem confusing about what to use. I recently published the visual above as a graphic with a LinkedIn post. It turns out it's a post I should have done much earlier!

Deneb Visual in Power BI

The Deneb visual sits in the center of the above diagram in the space between the no-code options on the left and the options that require coding on the right. In a recent video in my Power BI Weekly series course in the LinkedIn Learning library, I walk through how to configure the Deneb visual within Power BI Desktop.

Once we set up the Deneb visual, we can choose a visual to have it automatically write the code for us. We can then edit it for the visual configuration as well as the formatting (colors, font size, and so on). The Deneb visual is also a custom visual, so we need to import it first from the Power BI AppSource store into Power BI Desktop (the good news is that it's a free download).

Vega and Vega-Lite Languages

Behind the Deneb visual, there's an entire language called Vega. There's also a simpler version of the language called Vega-Lite. The great thing about the Deneb visual in Power BI though is that we can create a visual without writing a single line of code. Knowing these languages though becomes helpful when we want to create custom visuals or edit the formatting to exactly suit our visual requirements.

• There's a bit of documentation to explore on the Deneb visual in Power BI .
• I also found the Wikipedia overview of the Vega language fascinating.
• I went to the University of Washington, and I didn't realize they developed the language until I recently looked this up! They have documentation on both the Vega language and the Vega-Lite language.
• For more documentation on the Deneb visual in Power BI, also check out templates on GitHub from PowerBI.Tips.

Coming Up

That's it for this week. Merry Christmas to everyone celebrating tomorrow (and today for some of you already)!

-HW