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How to Create a Hello World R Visual in Power BI

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If you want to go beyond what is available in Power BI through DAX and the standard and custom visuals, you may want to experiment with R transformations, calculations, machine learning, and charts. This is how to create a very basic R visual in Power BI:

Steps:

  1. Check you R installation. Open your favorite R editor, for example RStudio. Check the path to your R installation – you might need this is step 2. In RStudio, click Tools, Global Options… and look at General, R version. Try this next R snippet to check a built-in dataset and display a chart:

    code snippet


  2. Enable R in Power BI Desktop. Click the drop-down just to the left of the Home tab in Power BI Desktop. Then choose Options and settings, Options, R scripting (under GLOBAL). The Detected R home directories: may already be pointing to the path in step 1. If not, click Other, then Browse and navigate to the correct R directory. Click OK when done.

    enable R in Power BI


  3. Create a dummy table to activate the R script visual in Power BI Desktop.
    1. On the Home tab, click Enter Data, then Load. This creates a table called Table1 with a column called Column1 that contains no data!
    2. Click the R script visual icon under Visualizations and Enable.
    3. Click Column1 under Table1 in Fields. Column1 should appear in the Values section under Visualizations and the R script editor will be activated with a data frame called dataset.
    4. In the editor enter plot(mtcars$mpg, mtcars$wt) and click the Run script button.

      run the script

      R script visual


  1. Save your pbix file and publish to PowerBI.com. Both save and publish are in the drop-down just to the left of the Home tab. You can now view and share your R visual. It is visible in your report in PowerBI.com, if you pin either the visual or the whole report to a dashboard. If you share the report or the dashboard it will also be visible to other users. As I write (January 2018), it will not yet work in Publish to Web or in Power BI Report Server.

  2. Next steps. This example is very simple! For more complex visuals I recommend R Graphics Cookbook by Winston Chang. And this example used a built-in dataset, mtcars – try and use 'real' data by using columns from your own tables in the Values section, then you can derive plots based on the data frame called dataset.
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