Today we are excited to announce that the Power BI service now supports reports and dashboards with R visuals. This update expands Power BI service visuals with endless flexibility, and adds advanced analytics depth.
These new rich R visuals are fully integrated into Power BI service reports, and can be filtered, cross filtered, and pinned to dashboards. The R visuals can be viewed by Power BI users without them having to be aware of this underlying technology.
With millions of users and thousands of ready-to-use packages, the R language adds great extensibility to Power BI, with endless complementary capabilities for analyzing and visualizing data.
Go ahead and try it!
We've created an example of a Power BI Desktop file (pbix file) with R scripts. To try it yourself, download the file and open it in Power BI Desktop, publish your report to the Power BI service, and experience R visuals in action.
How are R visuals created?
Authoring of R visuals is done in Power BI Desktop, and then published to the Power BI service. First, the report author has to create a new R visual, by selecting the R icon in the visualizations pane.
![clip_image002[1]](https://powerbicdn.azureedge.net/mediahandler/blog/media/PowerBI/blog/1264bc21-a190-462f-86ec-14f0ab987f42.jpg "clip_image002[1]")
After inserting the R visual type on the report canvas, the author can then drag data into the values fields, and finally paste the R script into the R script editor pane. Once the authoring is done, the new report containing R visuals has to be published to the Power BI service.
R visuals in the Power BI Service
R visuals behave in the service like any other visual in Power BI: users can interact, filter, slice, and pin them to a dashboard, or share them with others.
![clip_image004[1]](https://powerbicdn.azureedge.net/mediahandler/blog/media/PowerBI/blog/16ce4923-b0b6-49a9-a078-09e69eb8f112.jpg "clip_image004[1]")
Generating R visuals can be very easy! For example, the correlation plot shown above required only one line of R code: corrplot(M). Users who view R visuals in dashboards and reports do not need an understanding of R to gain insights.
In the visual below, you can see how the R script created a prediction of user visits over time:
For more information on R visuals in the service, see Use R scripts in Power BI to create advanced analytics and visualizations.
Licensing and restrictions
- R visuals in Power BI service are enabled only for domain verified Pro users. See more information about R visuals licensing in Power BI.
- Power BI service supports hundreds of the mostly used R packages. For requests to support further R packages in the service, please contact us.
- R visuals are not supported in Power BI embedded.
Send us feedback
Your feedback is critical, and we invite you to send us feedback on this new update to rinpbifb@microsoft.com.
We hope you enjoy this addition to the Power BI service, and keep enjoying the PoweR in BI!