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
Pingback: The Great Custom Visual Move – Curated SQL
I think Microsoft is doing a good job at killing PowerBI, they’ve spent more effort in making it profitable than they have in making it usable. That might work if there were not other alternatives, but the company I’m working at has abandoned PowerBI and gone with Tableau and Klip.
Tom, Thanks for mentioning Klip, the pricing is very reasonable indeed.
For what it’s worth, I’ve published all of the pre-Office Store versions of custom visuals to GitHub: https://github.com/deldersveld/power-bi-sunset-visuals
David —
Good of you to republish all of your visuals via github. Given the cost involved, I completely understand why you chose to distribute this way.
Thanks for including the link and for reading my blog.
Regards,
Ginger
Thanks Ginger. The repo is a black market for all custom visuals, not just my Hexbin Scatterplot. As for cost, yes, I’m stingy 🙂 It’s also a question of risk, particularly for long term support for an open-source project. In my opinion, there’s a difference in quality and time to develop and support between visuals backed by an organization like MAQ software or OKViz versus a hobbyist developer like me.
Hi, I am working with this custom visuals. I have imported them from store. But each time when I restart Power BI desktop these are disapeared and I need to import them from store again. Could you help me to understand this? Do I need to import them after each restarting Power BI or is there a way to keep them.
Thanks and regards
Sead
Sead —
You should not need to import the custom visuals again when you restart the desktop. The visuals are saved with Power BI. You might want to make your Visualization pane wider as it may be that you are not seeing all of the visuals you have added.
Regards,
Ginger