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R for the masses with Power BI

Headshot of article author Sharon Laivand

Today we are excited to announce that the Power BI service now supports reports and dashboards with R visuals. This update expands Power BI service visuals with endless flexibility, and adds advanced analytics depth. 

These new rich R visuals are fully integrated into Power BI service reports, and can be filtered, cross filtered, and pinned to dashboards. The R visuals can be viewed by Power BI users without them having to be aware of this underlying technology.

With millions of users and thousands of ready-to-use packages, the R language adds great extensibility to Power BI, with endless complementary capabilities for analyzing and visualizing data.

Go ahead and try it!

We've created an example of a Power BI Desktop file (pbix file) with R scripts. To try it yourself, download the file and open it in Power BI Desktop, publish your report to the Power BI service, and experience R visuals in action.

How are R visuals created?

Authoring of R visuals is done in Power BI Desktop, and then published to the Power BI service. First, the report author has to create a new R visual, by selecting the R icon in the visualizations pane.

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After inserting the R visual type on the report canvas, the author can then drag data into the values fields, and finally paste the R script into the R script editor pane. Once the authoring is done, the new report containing R visuals has to be published to the Power BI service.

R visuals in the Power BI Service

R visuals behave in the service like any other visual in Power BI: users can interact, filter, slice, and pin them to a dashboard, or share them with others.

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Generating R visuals can be very easy! For example, the correlation plot shown above required only one line of R code: corrplot(M). Users who view R visuals in dashboards and reports do not need an understanding of R to gain insights.

In the visual below, you can see how the R script created a prediction of user visits over time:

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For more information on R visuals in the service, see Use R scripts in Power BI to create advanced analytics and visualizations.

Licensing and restrictions

Send us feedback

Your feedback is critical, and we invite you to send us feedback on this new update to rinpbifb@microsoft.com.

We hope you enjoy this addition to the Power BI service, and keep enjoying the PoweR in BI!