Learning Microsoft Power BI

Appendix B. Some Favorite Custom Visuals

An incredible amount of development effort has been put into the creation of custom visuals in Power BI. In fact, in my last cursory count of custom visuals in Power BI’s AppSource listing, I found 404! Many of the custom visuals in this list are 100% free to download and use. Some have free elements and then elements you can license to expand their functionality; for example, the xViz, ZoomCharts, and Zebra BI visuals work this way. Everything in the app store, to my knowledge, has at least some free components.

Something to think about when you use custom visuals is whether a visual is certified. Certified visuals have extra functionality in line with the prepackaged visuals from Power BI, including the ability to export their results to PowerPoint or embed the visual in emails from subscriptions. Just because a visual is not certified does not mean it’s unsafe or a security risk. For more information on custom visual certification, see Microsoft’s documentation on the matter at “Get Your Power BI Visual Certified”.

In this appendix, I’ll provide a quick review on how to add custom visuals. I’ll also review some of my personal favorite custom visuals. Finally, I’ll introduce Charticulator, a free-to-use, no-code-required custom visual builder offered from Microsoft. For clarity, I will not include any visual that has a licensing component because, in full disclosure, I personally haven’t used a lot of them and can’t really speak to their ...