Importing a custom visual

The visuals included in Power BI out of the box will cover many use cases and be enough for most scenarios. If there are scenarios where the built-in visuals are not solving the requirements, then you should explore the custom visuals that have been made by many different developers found in AppSource, Microsoft’s marketplace for Power BI visuals. If you can’t find a visual you like, it is also possible to build your own custom visual for Power BI.

Microsoft AppSource contains visuals that have been created by Microsoft and Microsoft partners. Visuals can go through a certification process, so some visuals in AppSource have been certified and some have not. A certified visual has been tested and investigated by the Microsoft Power BI team to ensure it doesn’t access external services or resources and that it follows secure coding patterns and guidelines. Certification is not a required process, but many custom visual developers will choose to go through the process to further validate their work.

To create your own custom visual, you should start with the custom visual Software Development Kit (SDK), which is open source and based on Node.js (a JavaScript programming language). The development kit is available on GitHub. For the exam, you need to know that it is possible to create a custom visual but actually creating one is not required.

To add custom visuals from AppSource, click Get more visuals in the ellipsis menu on the Visualizations pane. The Power BI visuals window will display, where you can search and filter to find the visual you’d like to import into your report. Once the visual is located, click Add to add it to your report.

Figure 9.27 – Power BI visuals in Microsoft AppSource

Newly added custom visuals appear below the built-in visuals on the Visualizations pane. Once added to the report, visuals are added to the report canvas and configured similarly to the built-in visuals. In addition to built-in and custom visuals, each visual has formatting options that can be configured, but another powerful feature is conditional formatting based on data values. In the next section, we will explore how conditional formatting can be configured.