In this section I’m going to create a new power BI custom visual that will display the Tree Funnel chart I designed in Part 2. For now, it will just use the fixed test data. I won’t bind it to an actual Power BI data source till the next instalment. Continue reading “Power BI Custom Visual Part 3 – Moving D3 to Power BI”
Power BI Custom Visual Part 2A – SVG blend lines between elements
When drawing the paths for the Tree Funnel visual I noticed an unsightly line between each horizontal. Initially I thought this would be due to a small error in the stroke width introducing a gap but actually the calculation is perfect and each path is exactly adjacent. The lines are actually due to the anti-aliasing of each path. Continue reading “Power BI Custom Visual Part 2A – SVG blend lines between elements”
Power BI Custom Visual Part 2 – Creating a Tree Funnel Chart
Power BI Visuals basically render a bunch of HTML to display a chart. Typically these will be SVG elements and most likely use the D3 library to help draw them. So when I started on developing a Power BI Custom Visual it made sense to develop the chart rendering separately and worry about how to hook it into the Power BI Visual after I was happy with the basic chart logic. This section then is purely D3. Continue reading “Power BI Custom Visual Part 2 – Creating a Tree Funnel Chart”
Power BI Custom Visuals Part 1 – Introduction
I’d been interested in developing a Power BI custom visual for a while before actually getting round to producing something. The usual constraints on time were one reason but also the rather limited documentation and the number of components required which I have at best a surface knowledge of: Typescript and D3 in particular. Having finally found the time I found that the process was not too painful even starting from a pretty low base. The documentation however was sparse and so before detailing how I got on I thought I’d outline the resources I found useful. Continue reading “Power BI Custom Visuals Part 1 – Introduction”
Handling Overlapping Academic Years
Comparing measures year on year is normally a trivial task. Drop your years into the columns of a matrix and months into the rows and there you go. This all works so long as the dates in the years you’re comparing don’t “overlap”. How can they overlap? An example is the best way to illustrate this issue. Say we’re comparing student withdrawals between academic years which run SEP to AUG. But withdrawals from an academic year may be recorded with a date after the end the actual end of the academic year. Continue reading “Handling Overlapping Academic Years”
Charticulator for Dummies
A graphical tool for developing complex chart designs in minutes that can be exported as custom visuals directly to Power BI. Too good to be true? Maybe, but Charticulator is still an amazing bit of kit and to be fair it’s primarily intended to produce charts for the Web not for Power BI.
Charticulator is developed by Microsoft Research which means some very smart people worked on it and though there are plenty of tutorial examples as a lesser mortal I struggled a bit to understand how everything worked. So I’m sharing a very basic example here which explains the issues that confused me. In a separate post I’ll talk about how the export to Power BI and whether it really works. Continue reading “Charticulator for Dummies”
Aggregate Traffic Light KPI with Variable Targets in Power BI and Analysis Services Tabular
Setting up a KPI to monitor performance against a single target is simple enough in SSAS (it’s also possible directly in Power BI but I’ll only deal with the SSAS approach here). However if you have different targets for different dimension values then a bit more thought is required. As an example imagine different courses are set different targets for student withdrawals in an academic year. Continue reading “Aggregate Traffic Light KPI with Variable Targets in Power BI and Analysis Services Tabular”
Applications by UK Region: A Choropleth Map in Power BI
The Power BI shape map allows you to create simple choropleths (a map where the shading of a map region indicates some value) but comes with a very limited set of map regions. For the UK you only get UK countries so if you want to show other UK regions, you’ll have to source additional maps. Here I’ll show how you can map student applications by UK NUTS regions (Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics). Continue reading “Applications by UK Region: A Choropleth Map in Power BI”
Where’s the Old Default Power BI Theme?
A small thing this but, at some point, the Power BI default theme was changed to an eyesore of a palette reminiscent of the awful highlighting sometimes used in Excel by finance teams. Aside from being a bit ugly I’ve used the previous default theme for all my historical reports and want to keep this style. The old default is still available as the Classic theme. Continue reading “Where’s the Old Default Power BI Theme?”