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Installation | Usage | Training Videos

A key deliverable of Picasso project is the developing of custom Power BI visuals conforming Oxford Economics standards, while exploiting the rich data that Oxford Economics provides. The visuals are easily customizable to support your preferred style, which may be aligned or not with Oxford Economics standards. If your data are directly drawn by an online data source (e.g. Global Data Workstation API), then the visual will be updated, when you refresh your data.

Currently a line chart and a column chart have been implemented and ready to be imported in Power BI. Note that the data sets used for these charts should be compatible to the requested data fields. A list of supported Oxford Economics data sources is depicted in the diagram above. Generally, you can import in Power BI data from any Oxford Economics data source or any other personal data source you have, but you may need to process them before they can be used by Power BI visuals. The formatting process mainly consist of "cleaning" your data by empty or N/A values and also re-shaping them to fit in the Power BI data structure. You may watch the training video below that describes how you can prepare your data for the Power BI visuals.

Installation

In order to install the latest version of the Oxford Economics Custom Visuals for Power BI, you should follow these steps:

1. Download latest version of the custom visual
• OE Line Chart
• OE Column Chart
2. Extract the files from the downloaded .zip.
3. Open Power BI Application.
4. Select the ellipses (three dots) from the bottom of the Visualizations pane.
5. From the dropdown list, select "Import from file".
6. From the Open file menu, select the .pbiviz file that you want to import (i.e. the file you downloaded and extracted in steps 1-2) and then select "Open". The chart icon for the selected visual should be included in the bottom of the Visualizations pane and is now available for use in the report.

Usage

1. Import data in Power BI Application. Note that data should be re-shaped and cleaned to not contain empty or N/A values as described in the corresponding training video below.
2. Install OE chart visual, as described above.
3. Select the visual icon in the Visualization pane.
4. Add data to the appropriate data fields that are populated in the Visualization pane. Note: please visit Picasso website to see how you can create the optional combined metadata column.
5. As far as there are mandatory data fields that have not data or the inserted data are not compatible, an appropriate error message will be displayed in the visual to inform user.
6. When all required data are inserted appropriately, the visual will be rendered.
7. Optionally, select the Formatting group button (paintbrush icon) that is depicted next to data fields icon to customize the visual.

Interactivity

Oxford Economics Custom Power BI Visuals are interactive. You can filter the data using Filter pane options or slicers, cross-filter them by other visuals in the same report, select multiple data points (which will be highlighted), hover on data points to see the data contained in the tooltip that popups, and customize almost every element in the visual with a variety of options. All customization properties are displayed in the Formatting pane, under the Visualizations pane.

The detailed documentation of each custom visual is included in the .zip file, alongside with the .pbiviz file. In these documents, you can find information regarding all data fields and all customization options.

Training Videos

Below there is a collection of three training videos that describe the process of preparing the data for Power BI visuals, and detailed demonstrations of how you can install, use and customize both OE Line Chart and OE Column Chart.

Adelina Madhja is a Software Developer at Oxford Economics.
Arvindra Sehmi is Chief Information Officer and Director of IT at Oxford Economics.