What is new in the April 2018 Power BI Desktop update
Part five of a six-part series of blogs

This month's update allows users to add customisable buttons to a report, incorporates a numeric slicer and includes a few other smaller changes.

  1. New features in the April 2018 update of Power BI Desktop
  2. Action buttons
  3. Numeric slicers
  4. Changing the line and marker style for combination charts
  5. Choose your organisational custom visuals (this blog)
  6. Features still in preview as of April 2018

For a cumulative list of all of the updates to Power BI Desktop in the last few year or two, see this blog.  Our two-day Power BI Desktop course always uses the latest version of the software.

Posted by Andy Brown on 07 April 2018

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Choose your organisational custom visuals

There are currently 147 custom Power BI Desktop visuals listed on the Microsoft website, with a few more being added each month.  You can now select a few of them to be ones that you want to prioritise within your organisation.

Choosing your custom visuals

The first thing to do is to choose the custom visuals which you want to use to represent your corporate data.  I've gone for two:

Visual Notes
Word cloud Displays a word cloud showing which words have been most used for a text column.
Aquarium Displays numerical data as fish swimming to and fro (the larger the number, the bigger the fish!).

I've downloaded these two files from the website linked to above:

The PBIVIZ files

The two files that I want to make easily accessible to other owls.

Logging on to your admin account

We have a number of Office 365 subscriptions, so I've logged on to Power BI Service using one of these.  I can then get at the admin portal:

Admin portal

Click on the gear icon at the top right of Power BI Service to get this dropdown menu.

Adding organisational visuals

I can now choose to view my organisation's visuals:

Organization visuals

Choose this option to see the visuals to be used within your organisation.

 

You can click to add visuals:

Adding a custom visual

Click to add each custom visual.

Here's an example:

Adding aquarium custom visual

I've given the visual a new name, description and icon.

Using a custom visual

You can choose to add a custom visual in Power BI Desktop as normal:

Add custom visual

The icon and option to add a custom visual.

 

You can then click on the MY ORGANIZATION tab to see the custom visuals recommended for use within your company:

My organisation visuals

Click on this tab to see the two visuals you're recommending.

A neat way to promote the use of only certain visuals within your company! 

  1. New features in the April 2018 update of Power BI Desktop
  2. Action buttons
  3. Numeric slicers
  4. Changing the line and marker style for combination charts
  5. Choose your organisational custom visuals (this blog)
  6. Features still in preview as of April 2018
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