Daniel Marsh-Patrick
Founder & Principal Consultant, Coacervo | Microsoft MVP
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During his career across the UK and New Zealand, Daniel has helped drive enterprise-wide solutions through process and software engineering, predominantly through Business Intelligence (BI), data visualization, and software integration.
He is highly passionate about the Microsoft BI stack, particularly Power BI, and has delivered Power BI solutions since 2014. He is a Microsoft Data Platform MVP, contributing free and open-source custom visuals to the Power BI Marketplace, and a Power BI Community Super User. He regularly presents and blogs on a variety of Power BI subjects.
Daniel aims to empower people with the knowledge and tools to make their workdays easier by eliminating the tedious bits through software and/or common sense. He enjoys sharing the knowledge he has gained with anyone who desires to learn these skills for themselves.
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Practising Safe Custom Visuals
Custom visuals provide a further extension to Power BI’s already awesome visual palette, and there are some incredibly useful and beautiful visuals out there. You can also install visuals directly from files you build yourself or built by others.
While you should ideally be able to trust that custom visuals are improving your ability to tell your data story, it’s often worth knowing exactly what these can and can’t do with respect to your data so that you can make informed decisions about which ones to use.
In this session, we’ll discuss considerations when selecting custom visuals for your reports, potential pitfalls to look out for when evaluating them (including a demonstration of a “black hat” custom visual), and how to manage usage policies for custom visuals by your users at an enterprise level.
Think Outside the Chart: Creative Solutions with Core Visuals in Power BI
Power BI core visuals are designed to handle many common data visualization scenarios.
When faced with new visualization challenges outside what we think is available out of the box, we might need to start turning to custom visuals. However, new features have recently enhanced (and continue to enhance) many of the core visuals, expanding their capabilities. With some lateral thinking, you might be able to approach some challenges differently.
In this session, we'll explore creative uses of core visuals and DAX and show you how to extend your Power BI visualization toolkit.
What's New In Deneb
Deneb is a free and open-source custom visual for Power BI that gives you the power to create your bespoke visuals using the Vega or Vega-Lite visualization languages.
In the last few months, Deneb has had some significant updates to its functionality, and in this session, we will review some of the most useful ones and demonstrate how they can help you to be more creative inside Power BI.
Vega-Lite: An Alternative Approach for Custom Visual Development
Building custom visuals in Power BI gives you total control over your scenario and results can be very rewarding. However, there's a high learning curve, particularly if you are not familiar with web development tools and technologies.
If you're already familiar with R and/or Python, Power BI offers visuals with an interface for you to write code in these languages, and these options can help a lot with producing bespoke designs.
Vega-Lite is a "visualisation grammar" developed by the University of Washington Interactive Data Lab. It uses a declarative, JSON-based language that allows authors to build a range of bespoke visual designs with significantly less effort than coding from scratch.
In this session, we will introduce you to the Vega-Lite language via Deneb - a custom visual for Power BI. We will create some example visuals, as well as demonstrate some of the additional integration features with Power BI that aren't currently possible if using R & Python.
Using Deneb to Create Highly Bespoke Visuals
Business Intelligence projects are complex operations, and a large contributor to their success is the solid foundation of architecture, semantic models, and clean and repeatable data transformations. These can be engineering marvels, but your report consumers only sometimes appreciate the effort that this involves, and it can be challenging to show progress at these stages. The visual layer of reports can often suffer due to time pressures in getting the semantic model right, but this gives these consumers a window to your hard work. As such, it is essential that you have a similar degree of control over the visual canvas so that you can make sure that your users are engaged and correctly informed.
When constructing the perfect report, you have many options, starting with the core visuals and, if your organization permits it, a wealth of custom visuals developed and maintained by third parties. However, you can be somewhat limited if you have a visual that doesn’t meet your requirements. Microsoft provides the means to develop custom visuals yourself, but this has a steep learning curve and requires report developers to be familiar with web development technologies (HTML/JavaScript/CSS), which is not the cross-skilling you can accommodate on-demand if you don’t already have the experience. You also can leverage R and Python visuals, but these have some considerations and limitations regarding deployment.
Deneb, a free and open-source custom visual for Power BI, offers a unique ‘middle-ground’ between off-the-shelf visuals and full-blown development options. It leverages the Vega and Vega-Lite languages developed and maintained by the University of Washington Interactive Data Lab. These languages use a declarative visualization grammar concept, allowing you to build bespoke visuals using JSON without complex coding. Deneb also provides access to other Power BI functionalities, such as tooltips, cross-filtering, and formatting. It’s been available in AppSource for almost three years and is certified by Microsoft, ensuring your designs work seamlessly in PDF & PowerPoint exports, publish to web, and mobile reports. The community around Deneb and the Vega languages is steadily growing, and it is fast becoming a go-to tool for bespoke visualization requirements in Power BI. Daniel Marsh-Patrick is the creator and maintainer of Deneb and has considerable experience developing custom visual solutions in Power BI.
This workshop is not just about learning a new tool, but about gaining a new perspective on visualizing data. It’s recommended for users who wish to gain more control over the visual layer in Power BI. You will learn to use Deneb and Vega-Lite to “think visually” when ideating and iterating a bespoke solution rather than choosing a pre-defined visual from a palette. This includes thinking about interactivity features so that our users can take action from insight, what we have to consider in terms of designing these features, and Power BI’s limitations. You will also learn about the process of templating your work so that you can reuse it elsewhere in your organization or share it with others. With these principles established, the workshop will conclude with an exploration and explanation of some more advanced examples available and the key differences between Vega-Lite and Vega so that you finish up armed with the concepts to research and develop your own visual solutions.
To get the most out of the session, you should bring your laptop and charger so that you can follow along and experiment with your own ideas and variations to the exercises. You will need to have Power BI Desktop installed, and you should either have access to AppSource visuals or access to Deneb as an organizational visual for your tenant.
Panel Discussion - Q&A with Speakers
Join us for this end-of-the-day panel discussion with speakers to hear the discussion about a variety of topics in Power BI, Fabric, and AI.
Native Kernel Density Estimation in Power BI with DAX and SVG
Power BI is great at aggregating data, but when you have many data points and want to visualize their distribution, this can be challenging.
Kernel density estimation (KDE) is a means of uncovering the distribution of your data (think: "smooth histogram"), and this is commonly seen in violin plots to visualize the results. There are custom visuals that offer this functionality, but these have a limit on the number of rows that you can provide. If you have an extensive data set (hundreds of thousands or even millions of rows), you can only obtain so much data and can't get a true representation of your distribution.
In this session, we will review the challenges of analyzing a large dataset with a custom visual and talk through how we can write our own KDE function using DAX, which will quickly calculate the distribution of a vast data set, and then also use DAX to turn the output into SVG for display in a native visual.
Must have Custom Visuals
A whirl wind tour of the top two custom visuals: charticulator and deneb projects.
Data Visualisation in Power BI and Fabric: Wow with WoW
Join the Workout Wednesday Team for an engaging Table Talk on Data Visualisation in Power BI and Fabric.
What We Enjoy About Data Visualization: We'll kick off the discussion by sharing what excites us about data visualization. We'll also talk about our experiences with the Workout Wednesday challenges, sharing what we enjoy about these weekly exercises that develop our data visualization skills. Additionally, we'll highlight our favorite community learning paths, discussing how these resources have helped us grow and stay updated with the latest trends and techniques in data visualization.
Biggest Challenges: We will discuss our biggest challenges with data visualisation in our day to day work, a key topic being the decision-making process behind using custom visuals versus core visuals. We'll delve into scenarios where custom visuals provide unique advantages and when sticking with core visuals is more beneficial for clarity and performance.
Which visualisation tool in Fabric?: Finally, we'll discuss the decision making-process behind choosing the right reporting tool for the right job. We'll compare and contrast the use cases for various visualisation options in Fabric such as Goals, Paginated Reports, Power BI, Data Explorer, and Fabric Notebooks. We'll discuss the strengths of each tool, helping you understand when to leverage Power BI's robust reporting capabilities, Data Explorer's powerful querying features, or Fabric Notebooks' flexibility for data exploration and analysis.
Charticulator + DAX = More Insightful Visuals
Charticulator is a tool from Microsoft and is used for creating bespoke data visualisations. It's now available as a visual in Power BI and can massively expand your potential for creativity.
One of these benefits is that we now have a opportunity to leverage Charticulator to apply cosmetic features that previously required us to develop a custom visual, or having to make complicated changes to our data model to achieve more insight from our data viz.
In this session, we will step beyond the basic concepts and provide some some examples of how we can use row context and simpler measures to level-up our visuals for our readers and get to insight faster.
Bringing Visualisation Grammar to Power BI
Power BI's visuals are intuitive, highly-polished and look great. They serve many use-cases, but there are those who want to customise further. There are options to go beyond this and some are more involved and complicated than others.
Power BI has inbuilt R and Python visuals that let users write code to produce bespoke visuals inside the application. What if we used this idea to bring a new kind of custom visual to Power BI that could use the concept of a visualisation 'grammar' to build them instead?
In this session we will explore the concept of such a tool, and how we can use it to produce bespoke visuals in Power BI, starting with taking the data we want to work with and using a structural approach to quickly prototype and build a visual as we explore it.
An Introduction to Scrolling and Container Events in Deneb
Deneb is a certified custom visual that lets you use the declarative Vega and Vega-Lite languages inside Power BI. Recently, Deneb introduced some new features that provide more information to the developer for when a visual design may overflow the visible container on the canvas. This information can be leveraged to add new design approaches when your visual content overflows the available room.
In this session, we will introduce the feature, discuss some scenarios where this may apply, and show examples of what you can do for your users when such an event occurs.
Introduction to Dynamic SVG in Core Visuals
If you work in Power BI's report layer, you may already know that you can include images in some of the Power BI core visuals. Judicious usage of visuals can help enrich your tables, matrixes, and the New Card and New Slicer core visuals recently made available in public preview.
Among the image formats you can utilize are Scalable Vector Graphics (SVGs). These are not your typical images. They're high-resolution, vector-based graphics crafted from XML, which means they're not only readable by machines but also by us humans.
One of the neat things about having such a format is that you can leverage this to create dynamic images bound to your data. This includes awesome use cases like micro charts that can fit into a much smaller footprint than a dedicated visual, and with a little bit of knowledge in this area, you can greatly increase the information density of your reports without adding more visuals to the canvas.
In this session, we will examine the anatomy of SVG images and how we can use this to create dynamic charts in Power BI that you can use without any additional custom visuals from AppSource.
Deneb: Declarative Visualization in Power BI
Deneb is a certified custom visual for Power BI that lets you create your bespoke visuals right inside Desktop using either the Vega or Vega-Lite visualization grammars. Visuals can be prototyped and iteratively developed using their declarative JSON-based languages, providing a ‘code-like’ experience where you are not constrained to a specific type of chart.
While this methodology is more in line with the inbuilt R & Python visuals, Deneb addresses several shortcomings with those approaches where integration or deployment are concerned—providing support for interactivity, publishing to web and mobile reports, and exporting to PDF—running anywhere a certified custom visual can.
In this session, we will provide a short introduction to the visual and highlight some of the key features.
Custom visuals & Customizing visuals
The growth of customisable visuals, such as Deneb and Charticulator have allowed for increased customisation within reports. But Customisation of standard visuals is still much more widely practiced. We will discuss the benefits and potential pitfalls both directions have.
Adding Interactivity to Deneb Visuals
Deneb is a certified custom visual, that allows you to create your own bespoke visual designs in Power BI using the declarative JSON-based languages of Vega and Vega-Lite.
One big differentiator between Deneb and the R & Python visuals, is that your designs can interact with Power BI and other visuals on the page using standard features such as tooltips, cross-filtering, cross-highlighting and drillthrough.
Because some of these interactions require thought by you as a designer to implement suitable encodings for their state, this might seem daunting, but it can be very extensible and provide you with options for guiding your users that cannot be achieved using standard visuals.
In this session, we will take a simple visual and look at how we can extend it to be more fully-featured in the context of the report page.
Note that this session assumes some existing knowledge of Deneb and familiarity with JSON.
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