on 03 May 2016 19:41:23
On the one hand, custom visuals are great. Thanks to the engaged community we have new visualizations.
On the other hand, those visuals are buggy, unoptimized, not fully integrated, lacking functionality and sometimes of poor visual quality.
Hope the PowerBI team picks up on the shortcomings and improves them or release their own official versions.
Please vote ;)
Administrator on 20 May 2017 03:59:26
We are investing to constantly improve the custom visuals and the platform. performance, reliability, feature-set, etc. Most visuals are maintained by the community, and we encourage them to improve. recently the custom visuals gallery was migrated to the Office store, where reviews and ratings are available, so I encourage you to go and review visuals and ask for features directly from the developers. You can also use the dedicated community site to suggest ideas: https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Custom-Visuals-Ideas/idb-p/CustomVisualsIdeas
- Comments (9)
RE: Improve customs visuals quality
Agreed! It drives me absolutely insane that Microsoft checks off ideas for new visuals as soon as somebody submits a custom visual for that idea without any vetting process. Microsoft even tells you they have not vetted the custom visuals whenever you download them. You simply cannot say you have completed a new feature add when you are unwilling to stand behind the quality of it. Microsoft either needs to create a vetting process that a visual must pass before they get to close out all the ideas related to that visual, or allow folks to submit custom visual versions but leave the ideas open until Microsoft has officially added them as out-of-the-box visuals (should also ship with all future releases in order to be checked off as complete). You cannot even change data colors for the vast majority of them which makes them useless for professional quality dashboard creation.
RE: Improve customs visuals quality
I fully agree. Most of them are very good ideas, but they often lack functionnality. They are good demonstration of the possibility of the tools, but cannot be deployed into production "as is".
I would suggest to have a set of ideas for each of them so as to gather all suggestion
RE: Improve customs visuals quality
Agreed. I'm not a visual developer and don't know the submitting process but I get the idea there should be better requirements and guidelines for custom visuals. Just like an app store, things only get published if they meet certain standards.
RE: Improve customs visuals quality
The globe map is a good example of really poor visual quality, but a great idea that needs refinement.
RE: Improve customs visuals quality
I couldn't agree more! I tried to use the Linear Gauge, but it is full of bugs. The amount of white space it uses is ridiculous. If you try and make the gauge small, the line is too thin and the text is so small you can't read it. Also, the auto formatting of numbers does not work.
I had to create a new version of it myself to get it to work in a real-world scenario, but just as it was deployed and demoed to C-level users, they rolled out 'sandboxing' which broke the visual.
I now don't have confidence if the custom visuals to use them in production, which is a problem considering this seems to be the only place the visuals are currently being developed/added.
RE: Improve customs visuals quality
I agree.
RE: Improve customs visuals quality
I would agree with you with regards to many of the Custom Visuals. Even on the standard visuals, many of the times, the real estate the 'white-space' takes up, for example on the gauge, is like 30%. Last week I noticed the KPI visual has no way of choosing font size. As a result, if you want to use these on the top section of your report, for example, they will take up nearly 20% of your real estate.
RE: Improve customs visuals quality
Prior to publishing a custom visual to the gallery, efforts should be made to have consistent formatting options. I'm primarily thinking of Fill. Some existing visuals do not have the ability to change fill to match corporate colors or an existing report style. This can be a roadblock that prevents an otherwise good visual from being deployed in an organization.
RE: Improve customs visuals quality
I think this is a great idea. For example, the Sparkline by Prologika looks great but doesn't allow small multiples (which is what sparks are best for) and it'd be fantastic if it could also be customised to also show totals as a numeric value.