Here is the weekly Power BI Round Up, not too much going on which is a good thing after all the announcements from the Microsoft Data Insights Summit last week.

Power BI – Interactive Custom R Visuals

With R being so popular, as well as it being announced at the recent Microsoft Data Insights Summit, the Power BI team has now enabled the capability to be able to create R Custom visuals that are fully interactive by using HTML as the visual.

They have already created 4 visuals that you can start using now.

You can find the exciting details here: Interactive R custom visuals support is here!

Power BI – Community Blog

The Power BI Community also contributes and creates blog posts so that they can share their knowledge with the community.

In the past month’s community blog, there are posts from myself as well as others below.

Creating Slopegraphs in Power BI, by David Eldersveld

Did you know that it’s easy to transform Power BI’s Line Chart into a Slopegraph? No DAX or fancy workarounds are required. Slopegraphs are a great way to judge the rate and magnitude of change by looking at the steepness of a line’s slope.

Extracting Report Level measures DAX using SQL Profiler output, by Sergei Gundorov

In the May 2017 release of Power BI Desktop a new ‘report measures’ feature was released. It allows users who have connected Power BI Desktop to an external Analysis Services tabular model to write their own measures using DAX. Any user who has access to query the model can do this – just the same as if they were using Excel or SQL Management Studio to connect to the SSAS server.

First look at Power BI Report Server, by Daniel Christian

Power BI Report Server Preview was made available early May 2017 and this blog walks you through the installation, configuration and ends with a demo. The demo video shows how a report can built and added to the Power BI Report Server.

Power BI Desktop/DAX – Using Unicode (Arrows) as Measures in a Table, by Gilbert Quevauvilliers

In this blog post, Gilbert shows how to use Unicode characters to further leverage Power BI visuals within a table.

You can find the details here: Community Blog Highlights

Power BI – Data Refresh APIs

It is great to see that you can now refresh your data via an API. The one caveat that I have point out from the get go is that you are still limited by the amount of times you can refresh your data. So if you have a Pro license it will be 8 times a day and if you have Power BI Premium it will be 48 times a day. So you could easily go over this in the Pro version.

With that being said it is great to see that instead of having to log into the Power BI Service you can do it as part of an ETL process or some other kind of automation.

You can find the details here: Announcing Data Refresh APIs in the Power BI Service

Power BI – Facebook Solution Template

There is a new solution template for Facebook Brand and Campaign management. This solution template will enable you to not only view the history of your brand and campaigns, but also allow you to see author sentiment and key phrases on your Facebook pages.

I had a look at the cost estimator which starts out at an estimated $290 per month, which I think if you are using Facebook as a platform for your business you can gain some really valuable insights.

You can find more information here: Campaign/Brand Management for Facebook

Power BI – Help improve Power BI Desktop

Help improve Power BI Desktop by taking the survery and giving your input. This will help provide direct feedback to the Power BI Desktop team.

As well as there is a chance to win a $50 AMEX gift card.

Here is the link to the Survey: https://aka.ms/desktop2017

And here is a link to the blog post: Help Improve Power BI Desktop