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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.

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

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Visio JavaScript API preview announced

Microsoft have just announced the availability of the new Visio JavaScript Api ( see Visio JavaScript APIs Preview). I presented this last week at the Artic SharePoint Challenge in Oslo where a number of developers took the opportunity to create data-linked Visio diagrams in Visio, and interact with them in SharePoint.

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Here is an abbreviated version of my presentation, explaining the process of creating these dashboards from linking Visio shapes to data, to embedding in web pages …

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MSIgnite Sessions to Watch in Visio

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Well, MS Ignite is over for another year. I planned to visit loads of sessions, but the reality was that I spent many hours on the Visio booth. Fortunately, many of them were recorded, including ours, but I don’t have time to watch over 700 videos! So, I looked through them all and picked out 50-odd, and used Get & Transform in Excel again to create suitable queries to link to Visio.

The more I use PowerQuery, the more I like it. I was able to extract the unique values in the Personas, Tags, and Products columns which each contained comma separated lists. I data-linked these values to large circles on different pages, and data-linked the Sessions to Watch to hexagonal shapes. I then wrote a little VBA code to link the circles to the hexagons with data-linked connectors. Data Graphics was applied to all shapes, including the connectors, and a legend added. Each of the Session hexagons have an automatically created hyperlink to the On-Demand Video. I used a standard radial page layout so that I had minimal manual movement shapes.
The end result is a visual dashboard by Persona, Tag and Product to open the videos for the sessions I want to watch.

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Comparison of Visio Save As Web Outputs

SharePoint 2013 Visio Services provides a great solution for viewing the actual Visio file directly within a SharePoint web page, however you need to be logged into your corporate web to do this. So, how can you view Visio files in a web page if you cannot use Visio Services?

You could build a web page with the Visio Viewer control, but that is ActiveX and will only work in certain controlled conditions. The benchmark has to be allowing the Visio file to be viewed on an iPad, or an Android tablet, or Surface RT. Visio Services in SharePoint 2013 will enable this, and will allow for the Visio document to be zoomed, panned, and the Shape Data and hyperlinks to be viewed and used, but, again, this is not always available.

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