Do you extensively work with Power BI Custom Visuals?
The Custom Visuals Exploration Tool here is a Power BI App that connects to Microsoft AppSource and allows you to explore all the Power BI Custom Visuals on the marketplace. You can publish this report in your PowerBI.com tenant and can have it always up to date using a scheduled refresh.
The free version of the app loads only the 20 most recently released visuals. The full version lifts this limitation. Subscribe here to get the full version.
How To Set Up the Power BI App
Once you install the app from here, you can find it on the Apps page on Power BI. Click on the Custom Visuals Exploration Tool tile to open it.
You will then see a yellow pop-up at the top of your screen. Click Connect your data.
In the Connect to Custom Visuals Exploration Tool dialog box, keep “none” as the Subscription Email to use the free version, and click Next. If you already subscribed to the full version, enter the email you used during the subscription in the Subscription Email parameter.
In the next screen, select Anonymous as the Authentication method and Public as the Privacy level. Click Sign in and continue. In the next screen, repeat the same selections – select Anonymous as the Authentication method and Public as the Privacy level. Click Sign in and connect.
On the next page, click Sign in and connect.
You will now see the Refresh is now in progress notification. Once the refresh completes, you will have an up-to-date catalog of the custom visuals on AppSource available for analysis through the Power BI app.
In the free version, you will be able to view only the 20 most recent custom visuals. Click the highlighted sections in the report to subscribe to the full version.
If you connected the app, and subscribed later, you can activate the full version by following these steps:
- Go to the Custom Visuals Exploration Tool workspace.
- Select the ellipsis of the dataset, and select Settings.
- In the Settings page, scroll down and expand the Parameters section. Enter your email address in Email Subscription, and click Apply.
- It’s a good time to set a scheduled refresh on the same Settings page.
Next, go to the Workspace page and click the refresh button next to the dataset.
If you have refresh errors, go back to the dataset settings page and in the Data source credentials section click Edit credentials in each of the data sources, and make sure that the Authentication method is Anonymous and the Privacy level is Public, then click Sign in.
More about the app
You can explore the various pages on the left sidebar for different analyses of the custom visuals, including Summary, Popularity Analysis, Rating Summary, and Word Cloud. On the first page, Summary, you will be able to analyze different publishers based on their popularity and the number of custom visuals that they have published. The main table organizes every custom visual by its popularity. You can click on the visual title or thumbnail to go to its page on Microsoft AppSource, or click on the hyperlink in the PBIVIX column to download the custom visual.
At the top right, you can find a Play by Date control and a slicer to filter certified or non-certified visuals. At the top-left search bar, you can look up specific visuals by their name.
On the second page, Popularity Analysis, the scatter analyzes different custom visuals by their popularity and their number of ratings. Move the scrolls on the x and y-axis to zoom in on a specific range of popularity or number of ratings. In the bottom left, you can move the slicer to filter visuals with specific average ratings.
If you navigate to the third page, Rating Summary, you will see a chart that breaks down the star rating distribution of each visual. On the bottom left chart, you will be able to see the star distributions of the top five publishers (determined by the number of custom visuals published).
The final page, Word Cloud, offers a different way to search for visuals by their descriptions’ keywords.
To learn more about DataChant Power BI apps, and how you can manage your subscription go here.
