Excel

Published on January 6, 2018 by David Parker

PowerApps in PowerBI with Visio!!!

I am very excited to see that the preview for PowerApps in PowerBI has been released ( see Announcing availability of PowerApps custom visual for Power BI (preview) ). I saw this demonstrated months ago, and have been waiting impatiently ever since. Every time I have embedded a Visio diagram into PowerBI, I have wanted to display the selected shape data in a detail view … and now I can!
I cannot yet create a PowerBI report with the embedded PowerApps visual for consumption by the whole internet, but it should still solve many scenarios for organisations. I quickly added the new PowerApps visual to my example synchronised Org Chart and Desk Layout from my previous article ( #Visio in #PowerBI for viewing personnel hierarchies and locations ) , and recorded a simple selection in the following gif:

To do this, I simply created a default new PowerApps app from the queryOrg query in Excel workbook I created previously, and modified the Item value for the DetailForm of the DetailScreen. I removed the BrowseScreen and EditScreen because they were not required. Then, hey presto, the correct record is displayed whenever a shape is selected.

[Read more…]

Published on January 4, 2018 by David Parker

Visio in PowerBI for viewing personnel hierarchies and locations

My last article, Aliasing Data Columns for #Visio Organization Chart Wizard , mentioned the slight anomalies in the default Shape Data rows for the Organization Chart shapes and the Resources / Person shape. This prompted me to create an alternative view of the same data that can be linked to the Person shapes on a floor plan, and then to use the preview Visio Custom Visual in Power BI to display both views of personnel synchronised by the same data. This demonstrates how easy it is to create an effective dashboard for locating personnel locations and their position within an organisational hierarchy at the same time!

View the Power BI report online : Org Chart and Personnel Locations in PowerBI
I duplicated the queryOrg in PowerQuery in Excel, as queryPersonnel, and slightly modified the naming of columns to match the Resources / Person master Shape Data row labels, as described in the previous article. I could then add data-linked Person shapes to the floor plan into the Space shapes that I had already added to it. These Space Plan add-on to Visio also includes Space and Category Explorer window which can be used to find a person by their name or by their location.
I used Power BI Desktop edition to get the queryOrg query from the Excel workbook, and created three aggregating queries for Department, Position and Manager. These were used to provide hierarchy slicers on the report.
I used the Visio Custom Visual and the Hierarchy Slicer from the Store in Power BI in addition to the standard Table visual.
I had to reduce the shape count on my office floor plan drawing, because the preview of the VisioCustom Visual for Power BI has a shape count limitation ( see Add Visio visualizations to Power BI reports for more information). This meant removing all of the furniture shapes that I has added over the top of the embedded CAD file. I also changed the color of the embedded CAD file layers to shades of grey, because I intended to use colors in Power BI. In fact, I grey-scaled all of the Visio shapes in the office plan and the organisation chart to provide greater contrast to the colors in Power BI. The embedded Visio Online visual in Power BI will automatically suppress and Data Graphics (Text Callouts, Icon Sets, Data Bars or Color by Value), but I removed them in the Visio file too because it must delay the display if Visio Online needs to hide them.

One key learning point for me is that the preparation of a Visio file for consumption by Power BI is different than that for printing or normal online viewing.

Aliasing Data Columns for Visio Organization Chart Wizard
Adding clicks to infographics with Visio visual for PowerBI
Visio custom visual preview for PowerBI available for all!

Published on August 15, 2017 by David Parker

Updating data sources from Visio using MSFlow … easily!

Most of my posts have been about using Visio as a data consumer by linking Visio shapes to data, but Visio can be the best place to create some data from. For example, an office layout can have personnel or equipment shapes within a workstation area, or space shapes are used to define areas which are used for calculating the space usage chargeback reports. There are non-facilities management related examples too, as the only consideration is what is the best way to create relationships, measure lengths, or calculate areas. These are all tasks that are best done by just moving, resizing, connecting or containing shapes interactively in the Visio interface. In this article I will explain how Microsoft Flow can be used update a data source simply from a Visio document.

[Read more…]

Published on August 4, 2017 by David Parker

Previewing the Visio Custom Visual in PowerBI

It is time to talk about the new Visio custom visual for PowerBI. You may have read about it at Visio Power BI example and Add Visio visualizations to Power BI reports, but I wanted to add my findings. First, it is great to see this feature, but it is not yet the finished article. However, I hope I can show that it can be an extremely useful addition to the business intelligence toolset from Microsoft. I think that the existing Link Data to Shapes and Data Graphics features in Visio desktop are considered to be Operational Intelligence capabilities, whereas this new custom visual for PowerBI is definitely Business Intelligence. This is a different discipline, and I have been developing some guidelines for good practice when using Visio with PowerBI. In this article, I will demonstrate how I created a PowerBI dashboard using graphics and data from last years Microsoft Ignite conference.

Let me set the expectations because I am working with a preview of the Visio custom visual.

[Read more…]

Published on May 18, 2017 by David Parker

Data Visualizer for Visio Pro for Office 365 – Part 2

I walked though the steps to create a Cross-Functional flowchart automatically from an Excel table in my last article ( Data Visualizer for #Visio Pro for Office 365 – Part 1 ), but I often prefer to use a relational data source, such as Access or SQL Server, to store and organise my data. Therefore, I describe how Excel‘s Get Data (nee PowerQuery) can be used to merge together the data in a relational data source as a single table suitable for Data Visualizer in Visio Pro for Office 365.

[Read more…]

Published on May 18, 2017 by David Parker

Data Visualizer for Visio Pro for Office 365 – Part 1

Microsoft have just released Data Visualizer for Viso Pro for Office 365! This great new feature provides you with the ability to create diagrams from an Excel table automatically. It currently comes with two new templates for creating Basic or Cross-Functional flowcharts, but the feature can be used for many other different types of diagrams.