These past few months have been super exciting with all the goodness announced at the inaugural Microsoft Data Insights Summit, the BUILD 2016 conference and the latest round of updates to the Power BI service! We wanted to take a moment now and bubble up some of the latest Custom Visuals that have shown up in our gallery! As you may recall, custom visualizations were a highlight of the Insight Summit keynote with the announcement of the SandDance visual, and were used heavily throughout our demos and announcements at BUILD, but there’s so much more in store.
5 new visuals
In case you hadn’t noticed, five new visuals were added to the Visuals Gallery over the past few weeks, in addition to SandDance. Introducing:
- The LineDot chart, used by James Phillips in his keynote address, is an effective way for you to show progressive distribution of values over a period of time. Just as we did in the keynote, you can use this visual to show how much work is done (and at what time intervals) over a period of time.
- The Time Brush visual is a great way to let your users filter the set of data they are seeing on a report by clicking and selecting a range of time.
- The Table Sorter visual allows you to quickly create and sort stacked column tables, based on the weightings and column values that matter for your business.
- The Network Navigator visual can help you quickly identify interesting centers of gravity in a network of objects. The text search ability lets you drill into those weighted nodes and further explore relationships that matter.
- The Attribute Slicer visual is a great way for you to identify frequent entries and use them as filters for other visuals on the same report.
We’re particularly excited about when the Time Brush, Table Sorter, Network Navigator and Attribute Slicer visuals are brought together. We have been working with our public relations and media team to build a meaningful media presence management experience with these visuals when applied to social media outlets like Twitter. Using the Time Brush visual, our users are able to quickly filter to the time range that is of interest to inspect. From there, the Network Navigator visual enables the user to easily identify the at-mentions and hash-tags that are trending well/heavily used. These will show you the influencers reach out to and to follow. Similarly, the Attribute Slicer and Table Sorter visuals are incredibly helpful for finding fast-trending folks and tags that matter.
Because a picture is worth a thousand words (and an interactive one is even BETTER), here’s these 4 Custom Visualizations in action with sample Twitter data:
Continuing to unlock awesomeness
When we first announced the Custom Visuals platform we promised to provide useful visuals to our users on a regular basis. We hope we’ve been delivering on that promise! But hope isn’t enough – we want to hear your thoughts on what you need. To facilitate this, we’ve created a new Category in our Power BI Ideas forum specifically for Custom Visuals. Tell us what you think would be useful for you, and just like we do with everything else on Power BI Ideas, we’ll try and figure out how we can continue to delight you. You can find the new Custom Visuals category here: https://aka.ms/customvizideas.
Have a blast!
Jono