One of the great new features of the July release was the ability to now get all of the Power BI Custom Visuals from within Power BI. I had a bookmark to get the visuals from the Office Store, but it always seemed kind of a kludgy solution. Personally, I liked the visuals better when they were on the Power BI website prior to March of 2017. The filters worked better and they also included a sample file. Now I have a different and more technical reason to not like the visuals in the Office Store, some of the Power BI Custom Visuals are not there.
Some Power BI Visuals Are Not in the Office Store
This week I decided to do a demo using the Aquarium custom visual. As readers of my blog know, I have used the custom visual before, but it has been a while and I have changed PCs since then. No worries I can always go download the visual from the store, right? Wrong. The aquarium visual is not available on the new store. Neither is Image Viewer, if one is looking to add that into your latest Power BI report it is not available. What happened?
So Long and Thanks for All of the Fish
I found out from Adam Saxton b | t that moving Power BI custom visuals was not the simple cut and paste process that I had always assumed that it was. The people who write custom visuals had to re-write them. What’s more unlike when the custom visuals were housed on the Power BI Website, custom visual creators also had to pay $25 to register or $99 for their company. This means that some custom visuals may never appear in the store as the people who created them aren’t willing to pay money to give them away.
If you have the custom visuals, or as in my case you know someone who can give you a copy of a Power BI custom visual which was published prior to the move over to the Office Store, the visual will still work when you upload it to the service. I have also been told that Microsoft is working on adding the aquarium visual to the Office Store so at some point it will again be available for download. For those who have noticed that the Box and Whisker custom visual is not the same as the previous version, I doubt they will be able to download the old one. If they can find someone to give it to them, it will still work.
If I do find out when the Aquarium visual will be available from the store again, I will update this post. Until then, if there is a visual you want, I would try asking on Twitter, as that worked for me.
****UPDATE: On August 4, 2017 the Enlighten Aquarium is now available again! Here’s a link to the Office Store.
Yours Always
Ginger Grant
Data aficionado et SQL Raconteur