Designing R chart in #Powerbi just got a lot easier for a R novice

I have for a long time had the wish to use the power of R to create some fancy visuals in PowerBI, but I simply haven’t had the time to read the manual 🙂

Then today I saw a retweet about how to make ggplot2 easily –

And thought that might be able to help me get started – AND IT SURE DID

The tools are still under development so expect a few bumps

First – RStudio

You need to install RStudio on your computer to support the Addin. So if you haven’t done so already – go to https://www.rstudio.com/

To install the addin you can follow the instructions on the github site for the addin – https://github.com/dreamRs/esquisse

Simply insert this in code window and run it

R-Studio will then install the addin and all its help files etc.

Now we can run the addin by running this line

esquisse::esquisser()

and the design window will pop-up

But the magic happens when we do it from PowerBI Desktop

So I created a small data model based on AdventureWorksDW2014 database – for the ResellerSales

And I plot all the resellers by Sales_Amount and Sales_Profit and use the business type as the legend.

Then I insert the same fields in an R visual

And in order for the R- Visual to show a chart we have to open the R-Script Editor at the bottom of the screen

And now I have to paste or type my R-script code here ….. and this is typically where I previously started to search on google for what I needed to do.

I would quickly find the library ggplot2 was needed to create a scatterplot but then I needed to find out a lot about formatting and legends and axis etc. and normally I would give up within a few hours perhaps

The addin to the rescue

It is actually possible to activate the AddIn from the R Script editor 😀

If we add this line to the editor – and click RUN – magic will happen

esquisse::esquisser()

It loads the designer in the browser !!!

Our dataset is automatically available in dialog for choosing the dataset

635 records and 4 fields !!!

Choosing the dataset will give us a validation of the fields (OBS -Don’t use spaces in the fields you add !!)

We can now drag the fields to the different areas of axis, color and size and start to format the chart further

It will automatically switch between different types of visualizations depending on what you choose – and you can via the menus at the bottom do a lot of formatting and when you are done – you can open the Export & code windows and copy the code to the clipboard.

Then close the window and switch back to Power BI Desktop and paste in the code

Remember comment out the line esquisse::esquisser() by adding a # in front

Click on the Run Script and minimize the R Script editor and the R chart is now in your desktop – awesome!!!

The chart types supported in ggplot2 are these

And designing and using them just got a lot easier.

So I recommend that you follow and support them on github and help them fix bugs by reporting any issues.

Power ON!