High Quality Power BI Reports Using Custom Visuals

[EnterpriseDNA]

There are many visualization options in Power BI and one of them is custom visuals. I personally do not use custom visuals that much and I found some setbacks in using them. However, depending on what custom visual you’ll use, you can potentially create an insightful report. 

To be honest, I don’t love custom visuals, but I’m going to show you some of the best Power BI reports that used custom visuals and I really like how they turned out. These reports are created by our Enterprise DNA experts, and I’m going to share with you their tutorial videos.  

The first report that I want to feature in this blog is made by Greg Philps, who has done an amazing work in the Enterprise DNA Forum. This was one of his submissions in a Power BI challenge about HR consultations. 

The thing that I want to highlight in this report is the idea of creating dynamic text summaries within the report. There are so many visualization options and custom visuals in Power BI, and I didn’t even know this existed. But truly, this is just an epic technique and I’m just blown away. 

Explore and try implementing this into your Power BI reports because it simply makes your reports compelling and insightful. I really like this custom visual because it’s dynamic. It’s not static at all. 

Watch the full video below and see how it’s done. 

The next report that I want to showcase is created by another Enterprise DNA expert, Brian Julius. I want to highlight this report to show you what you can do with custom visuals in Power BI. Brian is a great contributor to the Enterprise DNA Forum, and I have learned so much from him. 

This report was made for one of our Power BI Challenges as well. The challenge was based on a patient data set for an optical company that does testing for the eyes. As you can see, Brian used different visualizations here. 

There are so many techniques embedded into this report. It may seem quite simple at first glance and there’s nothing fancy about the visualizations, but there’s a lot of logic built into this report, making it look seamless and very intuitive. 

Here’s the full video tutorial. 

Lastly, I want to share with you this tutorial made by Brian, where he showcases one of the best custom visuals that he stumbled upon, which you probably have not seen or heard of. This custom visual is best for visualizing the events in a horizontal timeline.  

In this tutorial, Greg shows what he did with the visual and walks through how to use it in case you’re interested in applying it to your own reports. 

Watch the full video tutorial below and see how Brian utilized it in his entry for a Power BI Challenge, which dealt with purchases, inventory, and sales. The data set was primarily focused on purchase orders, receivables, and invoices. 

These are just few examples of how you can set up custom visuals for Power BI. You need to explore more and experiment on custom visuals to get them to look exactly right, but it’s not difficult to do. You just need to be creative and intuitive. 

Key Take Away 

There are some excellent custom visuals that I’ve seen in Power BI reports. Power BI can accommodate many custom visuals, giving you freedom to make your reports your own.  

Like I mentioned, I don’t use custom visuals that much. Most of these amazing Power BI reports with custom visuals (such as the examples that I showed you in this blog) are created by our Enterprise DNA experts for our Power BI challenges.  

I have learned so much from them, that is why I encourage you to join in our challenges and check out the Enterprise DNA Forum as well. And honestly, I think I’m going to use some custom visuals in my future reports. 

I hope you’ve picked up some great tips here and implement them in your own reports. Check out the links below as well as our website for more Power BI content. 

All the best! 

Sam 

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