Redmonder: An R package for those working with Microsoft BI 04-23-2017 00:53 AM

[pmdci]

Those working with R know that coluring charts and plots can be a challenge. For that there is RColorBrewer: A package that allow users to easily colour their charts based on the colour principles of the Color Brewer website.

However I found time and again that I would rather user a different colour palette than those included with RColorBrewer. In particular I would like to find an easier way to work with the palettes found in MS Office and Power BI.

After consulting with the author of R Color Brewer, I decided to fork the package for a complete new set of colour palettes, based on those found in MS Office and Power BI. The result is a new package called "Redmonder".

UPDATE (JAN/2017): Due to the interest I saw in Redmonder, I have released it on CRAN. You can now find it on CRAN and on MRAN.

Regards,

P.

[boefraty]

Hi Pedro, 

We started to add Redmonder to our new R-powerd custom visuals (it will arrive with new HTML-based clustering soon) .

Great job!!! 

[pmdci]

That is so nice to 'hear'!  I am glad you lads found it useful! I hope it makes it easier for the PBI community to adopt R into their Power BI reports and dashboards. R support is my favourite functionality of Power BI!

Looking forward to see it (and all other neat features) into Power BI Embedded 

[ross27]

This is a great idea.  If you can get Microsoft to make this package available in the Power BI service that would be fantastic! 

[pmdci]

I'd be quite honest with you. I would rather Microsoft give users the ability to upload any package they want to PowerBI.com than having them benefiting my package.

I do believe that the ability to import any package is possible (Microsoft did this for Azure Machine Learning) and I even made a suggestion here.

In fairness unless the R support in Power BI allow for us to use any sort of package we want, then I don't see it taking off (it would be no more than a gimmick). At the moment I tend to use R more in custom reports and web pages, which combines with other BI tools (e.g. Excel reports in SharePoint, Power BI and Tableau). This is where I use Redmonder A LOT.

[boefraty]

Dear Redmonder author,

The Redmonder R package is very important for the integration of R in PBI.

In order to achieve maximal exposure, is it possible to get PBIX   with samples of visuals and/or R code ?

B.

[pmdci]

Hi there,

I am glad that you find it useful.

If I get enough interest form the commmunity, then by all means I will make such sample. First I think the most important thing would be to make the package available at CRAN (the R packages repository).

EDIT/UPDATE: I started the process of submiting Redmonder to the CRAN repository.

Regards,

P.