Download Custom Visuals For Building Interactive Dashboards And Reports In Power BI

Introduction

For building dashboards and reports, using Power BI there can be at times requirements of additional Visuals from the ones already present in the Console. In Power BI, the users already have the ability to download more custom visuals from the Power BI repository. In this article, we will get to know more on what are the ways to download the custom visuals and how to make use of them in building an interactive dashboard.

Step 1

From the above snapshot, we can access the repository in two different ways.

From the Home tab -> more visuals ->

• From AppSource
• From my Files

From the Visualizations pane -> Clicking on 3 horizontal dots ->

• Get more visuals
• Import a visual from a file

Here we can see that the visuals can be imported in two ways. The one from the repository maintained by Power BI and the other by importing locally from the system.

Step 2 - Inserting the Visual from AppSource through the Home Tab

On clicking the Appsource we get the following window,

There are two types of sources under the repository. The one under AppSource is accessible to all the users of Power Bi. The other one is my organization where the visuals are uploaded by the specific organization to help their reporting and building dashboards. The visuals under the organization are not available for the public unless they are uploaded onto the main source. Moreover, we can download the visual that we desire to work on from various categories.

Now for instance we want to install Bullet Chart for our dashboard. We need to click on Add. Post that the following message appears on the window.

We can also see the icon here at the bottom of the visualizations.

Step 3

Alternative to Step 2,

Here we can click on Get more visuals to access the AppSource or Import a visual from a file to load a custom visual from the local machine.

The next steps are purely the same in choosing the visual to download as laid down in Step -2.

Step 4

The difference between a visualization certified and one which is not certified, can be identified by the blue ticks in the AppSource.

From the above snapshot, we can see that the blue tick near the first two visuals are certified and ready to use whereas the last one is ready to use but the certification is not present, as the testing is not completed fully.

Step 5 - Removal of Custom visual

As we have learned from the above steps that we can download a visual from the Power BI repository. We can also remove them by clicking on the three horizontal dots in the Visualisations pane.

On clicking the “Remove a visual”, we get the following window:

Multiple visuals added from the repository will be shown under this list. Multiple visuals can be removed from this list by selecting them at once and clicking on the Remove button.

Conclusion

Hope you enjoy reading this article. You may also refer to my other articles for building an interactive dashboard using Power BI.