Tag: Power BI

Power BI, Power BI Desktop

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:

  1. Clicking the ellipsis button on the Visuals pane
  2. Clicking Remove a visual
  3. Selecting the custom visual
  4. Clicking the Remove button
Removing Custom Visuals From Power BI Desktop
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”
Enable Custom Vizuals
  • I used “KPIStatusWithHistory” custom visual in my sample model
Custom Vizuals
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Power BI

Power BI Publisher for Excel

Publish Excel to Power BI

Update: Publish your Excel (M365) reports to Power BI Service

The Excel Pulisher to Power BI Service is not available as an add-in anymore. It is now a built-in feature within the Excel app itself.

You can now publish your Excel reports directly from the Excel itself into your Power BI Service. Follow the steps below:

1- Click File menu then click Publish
2- Click Publish to Power BI
3- Select a Workspace you’d like to publish the report from the dropdown
4- Click Upload

Publishing Excel reports to Power BI Service

After the report successfully published to your Power BI Service, a yellow message shows up in Excel. You can click the Go to Power BI button.

Go to Power BI after Publishing Excel reports to Power BI from Excel

5- From your Power BI Service, click to open the published Excel report in Power BI Service

Opening a Published Excel report in Power BI Service

6- Select a chart
7- Click Pin
8- Select an Existing dashboard or New dashboard
9- Click Pin

Pinning a chart from an Excel report to Power BI Dashboard

All Done! If you navigate to your Power BI Dashboard, the pinned charts must appear on the dashboard.

Pinned charts in Power BI DashboardIf you’re using the older versions of Excel then continue reading.

It’s been awhile that lots of Excel users were wondering if there is a way to include their Excel elements into Power BI dashboards. With Power BI Publisher for Excel you’re now able to publish snapshots on your important PivotTables, Charts, cell ranges etc. to your Power BI Dashboards. In this post you’ll learn how to get the job done.

How does Power BI Publisher for Excel works?

With the Power BI Publisher Excel you take snapshots of your important insights in Excel and Pin them in Power BI Dashboards.

You need to download and install the Power BI Publisher for Excel from here.

What Excel elements you can/cannot pin?

You can pin almost everything in your Excel worksheet including:

  • A range of cells (from a simple sheet, from a table or a pivot table)
  • Pivot charts
  • Illustrations and images
  • Text

However, you cannot pin 3D Maps or visualisations from Power View.

Note: Although you can pin almost everything from your worksheet to a Power BI Dashboard it doesn’t make sense to pin some elements like Slicers or Timeline filters.

Enabling Power BI Publisher for Excel

The Power BI Publisher for Excel add-in should be enabled by default, however, if for some reason it is not enabled you can manually enable it as below:

Power BI Publisher for Excel 01
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Power BI, Power BI Service

Power BI and iFrame

Power BI is growing very quickly and there are tons of fantastic features added to it during the past few months. So there are lots of Power BI subjects we can talk about these days. In this article I want to represent a new feature added to Power BI Service which is “Publish to Web”. Publish to Web is basically putting Power BI reports in an iFrame. So now we can combine Power BI and iFrame  together and embed Power BI reports into a web page to share data insights to the Internet. Keep in mind that the data we publish to web will be available to anyone on the Internet. So we really need to make sure we do NOT share any confidential information and we have the rights to share that information.

Note: Publish to web feature is in Preview  so it is available for all users with no costs during the preview. So you don’t need to have a Pro account to be able to use this feature for now.

I also explain how to embed a rich media content in your Power BI Dashboard.

Note:  Publish to web and embedding a rich media content to your dashboard are different features available in Power BI Service.

Power BI Publish to Web

Publishing a Power BI report to web not only creates a link that you can send in email, but also creates HTML iFrame you can put in your blog or website. I would like to remind you again that the “Publish to Web” feature is only available in Power BI Service so don’t get confused by looking for such a feature in Power BI Desktop.

Enabling Power BI Publish to Web

To enable Power BI Publish to Web follow the steps below:

  • Login to your Power BI Service
  • Open a desired report
  • Click “File” menu then “Publish to Web”

Power BI and iFrame

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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

Power BI Azure SQL DW PassIn 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” →