How to Disable Custom Visual in Power BI Desktop Model

Update Sep 2022: I wrote this blogpost in Mar 2016. Power BI Desktop improved a lot since then. Currently, Power BI Administrators can Enable or Disable custom visuals for the reports published to Power BI Service from Power BI Admin Portal across the organisation or to certain security groups. There are also some settings for system administrators to Enable or Disable custom visuals on the user’s Power BI Desktop across the organisation via group policy settings. The users can also remove custom visuals from Power BI Desktop by following these steps:

Clicking the ellipsis button on the Visuals pane
Clicking Remove a visual
Selecting the custom visual
Clicking the Remove button

Removing Custom Visuals From Power BI Desktop

Disclaimer: The method described in this post includes modifying Power BI file (PBIX) outside of Power BI Desktop. It is highly recommended to take a backup of your PBIX file beforehand. It’s highly probable that you corrupt your PBIX file if make a mistake when following the method described here. So please follow the process on YOUR OWN RISK!

Custom visuals are awesome. It’s easy to import them to Power BI Desktop model and start using them. But, what if you decide to remove them from your model? Is there a way to disable an imported custom visual?

Well, the answer is No and Yes! I mean, NO, there is no specific setting or option you can manage imported custom visuals in Power BI Desktop. But, YES, there is a way you can get rid of an existing custom visual. In this article I show you how to do the job.

First of all, I’d like to inform you that Microsoft will add the feature to disable custom visuals in Power BI Desktop, but, until then you can follow the my trick to completely disable/remove a custom visual from your Power BI Desktop model.

As you might already know a PBIX file is a compressed file indeed, so you can open it with a ZIP editor software like 7-Zip.

Requirements:

Download and install 7-Zip. It’s a free open source file archiver/compressor
Download and install Notepad++ which is also free and open source. It’s an awesome text editor

Removing/disabling Custom Visual

Open you Power BI Desktop model (PBIX file) containing a custom visual
As you see you need to enable custom visuals, click “Enable custom visuals”

I used “KPIStatusWithHistory” custom visual in my sample model

Continue reading →

Azure, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Pass Business Intelligence Virtual Chapter, Power BI, Power BI Desktop, Power BI Service, Presentations

Webinar Materials: Visualising Azure SQL DW with Power BI

In the previous post I announced that I will speak in “Visualising Your Azure SQL Data Warehouse with Power BI” webinar on 23 Jan 2016. The webinar host was Pass Business Intelligence Virtual Chapter. It was such an amazing experience for me to speak in the webinar and I would like to thank all 105 attendees. The attendees showed their enthusiasm by asking lots of questions during the webinar.

In this webinar I demonstrated:

How to install Azure SQL DW in Azure Portal
How to configure firewall settings from Azure Portal and SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 2016
How to connect directly from Azure SQL DW to Power BI Service and the other way around
How to visualise you Azure SQL DW data warehouse data with Power BI Desktop (both Data Import and DirectQuery scenarios)
Comparing the features of different scenarios that helps you finding the best for your use cases

and much more…

You can see and download the session materials as follows.

Session Materials

Watch Visualising Your Azure SQL Data Warehouse with Power BI on YouTube

Continue reading “Webinar Materials: Visualising Azure SQL DW with Power BI” →

BISM Multidimensional, BISM Tabular, On-premises Data Gateway Enterprise Mode, Power BI, Power BI Desktop, SQL Server Analysis Services - SSAS

Power BI Enterprise Gateway, Everything You Need to Know

On-premises Data Gateway (aka Power BI Enterprise Gateway) is release a while ago (2 Dec. 2015), but, with the latest release on 22 Dec. 2015 Power BI Enterprise Gateway now supports live connections to both SQL Server Analysis Services Multidimensional and Tabular models as well as SAP HANA. In this post I’ll explain lots of important aspects of the Power BI Enterprise Gateway including installation, configuration for different data sources including SSAS Multidimensional, Tabular and SQL Server Database and much more. If you need to have the lowest possible latency then you need DirectQuery/Explore Live feature on top of your on-premises data sources. The good news is that Power BI Enterprise Gateway now supports all following data sources:

SQL Server Database
SQL Server Analysis Services Multidimensional
SQL Server Analysis Services Tabular
SAP HANA
In this article you’ll learn how to install and configure Power BI Enterprise Gate Way, how to manage different live data sources, how to create reports on top of live data sources and more.
Note 1: If you want to use DirectQuery to connect to your on-prem SQL Server Database OR Explore Live your SQL Server Analysis Services Tabular model then you might not need to install and use the Power BI Enterprise Gateway. In those cases you can install Power BI Personal Gateway to connect to an instance of SQL Server OR install Power BI Analysis Services Connector to connect to your on-prem instance of SQL Server Analysis Services Tabular model rather than installing the Power BI Enterprise Gateway. But, bear in mind that selecting the best gateway is really depending on your use cases, your data sources and the environment you’re working on.
Note 2: The Power BI Enterprise Gateway and Power BI Personal Gateway CAN be installed on the same machine.

Downloading and Installing Power BI Enterprise Gateway

You can download the gateway from the dedicated download page for On-premises Data Gateway on Microsoft website or after logging into Power BI Service with your account, click on “Data Gateway” from the download menu:

OR you can go straight to the gateway page then download the Power BI Gateway – Enterprise (Preview):

Continue reading “Power BI Enterprise Gateway, Everything You Need to Know” →

Azure, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Power BI, Power BI Desktop, Power BI Web App

Azure SQL Data Warehouse and Power BI

Without a doubt cloud computing is going to change the future of data analytics and data visualisation very significantly. Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse recently released for public preview. Combining Power BI as a powerful data visualisation tool with Azure SQL Data Warehouse will give the users the ability to see data insights of their data stored in Azure Data Warehouse very easily. In this post I explain how to install Azure SQL Data Warehouse and the the way it works with Power BI. Before going any further I’d like to have a look at the Azure SQL Data Warehouse very briefly.

What Is Azure SQL Data Warehouse?

Based on Microsoft documentation a SQL Data Warehouse is

“Azure SQL Data Warehouse is an enterprise-class distributed database capable of processing petabyte volumes of relational and non-relational data.”

Azure SQL Data Warehouse supports stored procedures, user-defined functions, indexes and collations. It uses columnstore index technology which significantly improves query performance as well as getting you up to 5 times compression in compare with traditional row based indexing.

I leave it to you learn more about Azure SQL Data Warehouse. But, it is important to keep in mind that there are some features like primary keys and foreign keys that are NOT supported in Azure SQL Data Warehouse which affect the way we use Power BI as a data visualisation tool over Azure SQL Data Warehouse. Without primary keys and foreign keys there is no physical relationships between the tables so Power BI service cannot detect any relationships by itself. There is a workaround for this that we can create some SQL views in Azure side to make it work. This can be an expensive solution. The other way is to load the data warehouse into a Power BI Desktop model which can detect the relationships automatically.

Now you know a bit bout Azure SQL Data Warehouse let’s get back to the subject and talk more about Power BI and Azure SQL Data Warehouse.

First things first. You need to have a Microsoft Azure subscription. If you don’t already have it you can use it for a one month trial here. You’ll also get $250 credit. But, remember that if you succeed the $250 in less than a month then you’ll need to pay for it if you want to use it longer.