Hello! It’s me, Maya (you can find me on Linkedin here). As usual, I bear with me exciting news: we have just published a new, super-useful update of the Power BI Custom Visuals Exploration Tool.
The Power BI Custom Visuals Exploration Tool (install it here) connects directly to AppSource to present all the publicly available custom visuals. It gathers information about those custom visuals and presents them, to help you assess their features, uses, and performance.
In the past, we used a ranking system to analyze the performance of the visuals. This ranking factored in the average ratings and the number of raters. The new update introduces a new measure to this comparison: visual popularity. We are also introducing a whole new analysis of visuals’ and publishers’ star ratings.
What’s New in the App?
On the first page of the update, we have modified the second bar chart to organize publishers by their visuals’ popularity. The rank system is also adjusted, and rank is now calculated using the new popularity measure.
Since clearly, we are very excited about the new popularity measure that Microsoft provided us through their undocumented API, we added a new page to the app called Popularity Analysis. This page presents a scatter chart that compares visuals based on their popularity and number of ratings. You can zoom in on a specific range of popularity or number of ratings by adjusting the scrolls on the X and Y-axis. The slicer on the bottom left makes it even easier to choose which visual will win the Prom Queen title this year, since adjusting it will allow you to filter visuals by specific average ratings.
One good use of the Average Rating Slicer combined with the scatter chart will allow you to find popular and low-rated visuals, which suggests that there is a high demand for such visuals with an opportunity to develop better ones. On the other hand – you can view high-rated visuals with lower popularity to find hidden gems.
Another exciting feature in the report can be found on the new Rating Summary page, where you can now see the star distribution of each individual visual on AppSource. You can also examine the star distributions of the top five publishers (determined by the number of visuals published).
