Power BI demo - Creating Effective Graphs with Microsoft R Open 02-12-2017 13:17 PM

[mike_honey]

This demo is a companion to the excellent white paper and sample project: Creating Effective Graphs with Microsoft R Open, by by Naomi B. Robbins and Joyce Robbins:

https://github.com/nbrgraphs/mro 

In this demo file I have implemented the R scripts and Graphs shown in that white paper using Power BI, to showcase it's R Integration features. The pages in this report correspond to the Chapters in the white paper.

Where text/CSV files were used in the white paper, I have replaced the R code to load them with data from a Power BI Query. This gives an opportunity to demonstrate Power BI's interactive filtering, where Slicers or other visuals can be selected to filter and dynamically generate R graphs.

In my opinion Power BI represents a great platform to host R graphs/visualizations, and mash up R data integration scripts with Power BI data integration.

The example below shows 4 R graphs all controlled by a single Power BI slicer, with no extra code required:

[mike_honey]

Prerequisites (The sample .pbix files will not work without these prerequites completed)

1. Install R Engine

Power BI Desktop does not include, deploy or install the R engine. To run R scripts in Power BI Desktop, you must separately installR on your local computer. You can download and install R for free from many locations, including the Revolution Open download page, and the CRAN Repository.

2. Install the required R packages.

Download the R script attached to this message and run it to install all required packages on your local machine. 

Required R packages:

stats, lattice, MASS, ggplot2, tidyr, HH, dplyr, micromapST

Tested on:

CRAN 3.3.1, MRO 3.3.1, Power BI Desktop 2.38 (August 2016)

Legal Disclaimers:

Terms of Service and Third Party Programs.

[mike_honey]

Screen shots of my pages for:

2. Direct Comparisons

3. Distributions

4. Trends over time

[mike_honey]

Screen shots of my pages for:

5. Relationships

6. Percents

7. Special Cases

[kavasimihaly]

Thanks,

it's a great help for me to learn how to use R with Power BI.

Great work.

[boefraty]

This is an amazing work.  If you consider to convert some of your R-visuals to R-powered-custom visuals, out team will be happy to assist you.  Almost all of these visuals are great candidates for the PBI Gallery ! I tested the support for R-packages in service, all of the  packages beside "micromapST" are already supported.

The visibility of R-powered custom visuals in gallery is greater and it is not limited for R-users. 

[is_ibrahim]

Hi Mike,

I've a question that is more related to Integration Architecture between PowerBI and HDInsight. Let's assume that my data is stored in Azure Storage Account or Data Lake STorage, and I have also HDInsight cluster running Microsoft R Server. In PowerBI, I need the R visual script to work on a massive amount of data stored in Data Lake Storage and run using Microsoft R Server, then it returns a relatively managebale dataset to be visualised. 

Is this architecture attainable?

Thanks.

Is