Using Power BI to Display R Visuals

 Microsoft has in the past few months increased the support for R Visuals in Power BI. In the July release, Power BI Service started displaying interactive visuals and in October, six R visuals were made

rvisualsavailable in Power BI which do not require any knowledge of R. Six visuals is a far step away from the wide number of visuals available in R. According to the Comprehensive R [CRAN] as of today there are 9557 packages available for R, and that does not count all of the packages on GitHub.

R Packages Supported in the Power BI Service

According to a September 8th post on the Power BI Blog, there are currently 352 R packages supported in the Power BI Service. For those of you wondering if your favorite R library is included (yes dplyr, ggplot2 and cluster are there) I have included the list of packages here.

abc abc.data acepack actuar ade4 AdMit andrews
aod apcluster ape aplpack approximator arm arules
arulesViz assertthat BACCO BaM BAS base64enc bayesm
bayesQR bayesSurv BayesTree BayHaz bbemkr BCBCSF BCE
bclust BenfordTests bisoreg bit bit64 bitops BMA
Bmix BMS0 bnlearn, boa boot bootstrap bqtl
BradleyTerry2 brew brglm, bspec bspmma BVS C50
calibrator car caret, catnet caTools cclust class
clue cluster coda coin CORElearn corpcor corrplot
crayon cslogistic cubature cvTools data.table date dbscan
deal deepnet deldir dendextend DEoptimR deSolve DiagrammeR
dichromat digest dlm DMwR dplyr DPpackage dse
dtw e1071 earth EbayesThresh ebdbNet ellipse emulator
ensembleBMA entropy EvalEst evaluate evdbayes exactLoglinTest expm
extremevalues FactoMineR factorQR faoutlier fBasics fields filehash
fitdistrplus flashClust FME fmsb foreach forecast Formula
fracdiff fTrading futile.logger gam gamlr gclus gdata
gee genetics geoRglm geosphere ggdendro ggmcmc ggplot2
ggthemes glmmBUGS glmnet gmodels gmp gnm GPArotation
gridBase gridExtra growcurves grpreg gss gsubfn gtable
gtools haplo.stats hash hbsae hdrcde heavy HH
HI Hmisc HSAUR ifultools intervals ipred irlba
irr iterators jpeg kernlab KernSmooth KFKSDS kinship2
kknn klaR knitr labeling lars lattice latticeExtra
lava lavaan lazyeval leaps LearnBayes LiblineaR LICORS
limSolve lme4 lmm lmtest locfit locpol LogicReg
lsa lubridate magic magrittr mapdata mapproj maps
maptree MASS MasterBayes Matrix matrixcalc MatrixModels maxent
maxLik mboost mda memoise mi mice microbenchmark
mime misc3d miscTools mitools mixtools mlbench mnormt
MNP modeltools mombf monomvn MSBVAR msm multcomp
munsell mvtnorm NbClust ncvreg nlme nloptr NLP
NMF nnet nnls nortest numbers numDeriv OutlierDC
pacbpred party partykit PAWL pbivnorm pcaPP pdc
PerformanceAnalytics plotmo plotrix pls plyr png polynom
predmixcor PresenceAbsence profdpm proto proxy pryr pscl
psych qap qdapRegex quadprog quantreg qvcalc R.oo
.utils ramps RandomFieldsUtils RColorBrewer Rcpp RcppArmadillo RcppEigen
registry reliampo relimp reshape reshape2 RGraphics rjson
RJSONIO Rmpfr rms robustbase ROCR rpart.plot rrcov
rscproxy RSGHB RTextTools rworldmap SampleSizeMeans SampleSizeProportions sbgcop
scales scatterplot3d sciplot segmented seriation setRNG sfsmisc
SIS SixSigma skmeans slam smoothSurv sna snow
SnowballC snowFT sp spacetime spam SparseM spatial
spBayes spikeslab splancs spls spTimer sqldf sROC
stabledist stabs stepPlr stringdist stringr stsm stsm.class
survival tau tcltk2 tensorA textcat textir tfplot
TH.data tidyr timeDate timeSeries tm topicmodels tree
tseries tsfa tsoutliers TSP vcd VennDiagram VGAM
VIM whisker wordcloud xgboost XML xts yaml
zipfR zoo

 

 

I hope that some day that this list becomes much longer, but it is a good start. If your company has lots R visuals and you wish to migrate them to Power BI, chances are some of the libraries you are using are not here. If you are interested in having your library added to the list of 352, go to the Ideas page of Power BI and request that your library be added, as Microsoft I know looks at this page to determine what to release in the future. Someone has requested that igraph be added, and since it hasn’t received a lot of votes yet (hint) it is probably low on the priority list.

Release Plans for Additional R Library Support in Power BI

In reviewing the Power BI documentation online, it is not known what Microsoft’s plans are for future R packages. Does Microsoft plan on adding a lot more in the future? Will new libraries be added as part of upcoming releases? All questions where the web presently does not provide answers.

The current package support in Power BI does provide the R developer with a method to more securely and widely distribute R visualizations. In my upcoming posts I will review how to use the six R visualizations which do not require R and also how to use R with Power BI.

Yours Always

Ginger Grant

Data aficionado et SQL Raconteur

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