Power BI becomes more useful when visuals match the questions your team needs to answer. This article reviews five custom options, ZoomCharts Drill Down, KPI Matrix, Sankey, Deneb, and Word Cloud, and explains where each adds clarity beyond native charts.
You will also find a concise walkthrough for building your own visuals with pbiviz, Node.js, TypeScript, and D3.js, from setup to packaging.
Finally, we outline practical guidelines for security, performance, and interaction design so reports stay fast and reliable. The outcome is simple: pick visuals that fit the task, then implement them with care.
Top Custom Power BI Visuals for Better Interpretation
The right Power BI visuals can boost your data analysis capabilities. Here are five custom visuals that give you advanced interpretation features you won’t find in standard options.
ZoomCharts Drill Down For Hierarchical Data
ZoomCharts Drill Down changes the way users direct complex hierarchical data. This visual makes data exploration “easy, fast, and exciting”. It works smoothly with both mouse and touch inputs. Users start with a high-level overview and then dive deeper into specific segments.
This visual stands out because of its customization options that “push the limits of Power BI reports”. You can zoom in, drill down, and explore each node in complex networks.
The visual handles large networks with hundreds of nodes smoothly through features like:
- Dynamic filtering on click/tap
- Highlighting capabilities
- In-visual PIN functionality
- Toggling between linear and logarithmic views
Users have seen great results. A customer analytics manager said, “ZoomCharts Power BI visualizations deliver value and efficiency for our decision-making process”. Another user found that what “usually takes a lot of time to set up is now only done once”.
KPI Matrix for Multi-KPI Comparison
The KPI Matrix visual helps track performance by displaying multiple metrics in a single, well-organized view. Standard KPI cards display individual metrics, whereas the KPI Matrix organizes multiple indicators in a tabular format. This makes it perfect for creating balanced scorecards across different business views.
You get these key features:
- Actual values compared against targets
- Visual indicators for performance status
- Trend visualization with minicharts
- Conditional formatting for better visual cues
Finance teams love this visual, especially when they evaluate business performance using measurable data against management’s targets. The matrix layout shows relationships between data dimensions or displays different KPIs at once, giving you a detailed performance snapshot.
Sankey Chart For Flow And Relationship Analysis
Sankey charts help you see flows between categories and make complex relationships clear quickly. These charts use nodes for categories and flows for connections. The width of each flow shows the quantity it represents.
Microsoft calls Sankey “an exciting, beautiful, efficient, informative visual for flow”.
People use it for:
- Website user trip analysis
- Customer behavior mapping
- Energy or resource distribution
- Financial transaction movement
- Supply chain visualization
Sankey charts help users “clearly find the sources, destinations, and steps in between”. They work best for showing information with clear start and end points, or dynamic relationships with many steps in between.
Deneb For JSON-Based Custom Charting
Deneb brings a major upgrade to custom visualization options. It works as a system that puts Vega or Vega-Lite visualizations into Power BI. Unlike other custom visuals, you can describe visualizations in JSON format instead of JavaScript.
Microsoft has certified Deneb, which means it “doesn’t access external services or resources and can be exported to PDF or displayed in emails”. It works with Power BI’s interactive features like tooltips, cross-filtering, and drill-through.
Users say Deneb has brought Power BI’s visualization capabilities up to speed with Tableau and beyond. One big plus is speed – Deneb visuals “perform about 30x faster than Python visuals” while staying interactive.
Word Cloud For Text-Based Insights
Word Cloud visuals give quick insights into text data by showing words sized by their frequency or value. This makes text analysis “exciting and fun in Power BI”. You can spot the most important terms in your data instantly.
Users don’t need to “tediously dig through large volumes of text”. They can see word frequency right away and get the big picture. Power BI’s interactive features let them explore the themes behind the content further.
You can customize the visual with:
- Common stop word exclusions
- Word orientation and angle controls
- Font size adjustments
- Specific word color customization
These features make Word Cloud perfect for analyzing customer reviews, comparing product sales visually, or showing text insights to non-technical audiences.
Browse more Zebra BI visuals to add to your visualization toolkit beyond these five powerful examples.
Creating Your Own Custom Visuals with pbiviz
Custom Power BI visuals created with pbiviz give you full control over data presentation. This developer-centric method helps you build exactly what you need when pre-built solutions don’t meet your requirements.
Installing Power BI Visual Tools and Node.js
Your environment needs a proper setup before you start custom visual development. Download and install Node.js from the official website, since this JavaScript runtime powers the development tools. Launch PowerShell and run: npm install -g powerbi-visuals-tools@latest
This command adds the pbiviz package globally to your system. You might notice some warnings during installation, but they usually won’t affect the tools’ functionality.
Type pbiviz in PowerShell to verify your installation and check the list of supported commands.
The developer mode needs activation:
- Power BI Desktop users should go to: File > Options > Report settings > Enable “Develop a visual”
- Power BI Service users should access: Settings > Developer > Turn on “Power BI Developer mode”
Developing Visuals Using TypeScript And D3.js
Your environment setup leads to the next step. Create a new visual project:
pbiviz new myCustomVisual
cd myCustomVisual
This command creates a project framework with all the required files. TypeScript drives the core development with the D3.js framework that adds HTML, SVG, and CSS capabilities to your visuals.
Power BI runs D3.js visuals within a frame that contains:
- SVG element for rendering
- Data retrieval functions
- Frame dimensions
- Color arrays for consistency
D3.js version 3.5.17 powers these visuals, and each visual handles up to 30,000 datapoints.
Packaging And Importing .pbiviz Files
Package your completed visual by running the .pbiviz package. This creates a .pbiviz file in your project’s /dist/ directory. This file contains everything needed for your custom visual.
Your packaged visual needs these steps to import:
- Launch Power BI Desktop with developer mode enabled
- Find the Visualizations pane
- Import the .pbiviz file
Your team members can use these custom visuals, but security demands importing visuals only from trusted sources. Organizations should submit visuals to AppSource for wider distribution.
Power BI visuals offer great examples to inspire your custom creations. Custom visualizations help you tell your data story exactly how you want it while moving past the limitations of standard options.
Best Practices for Custom Visual Implementation
The right implementation of Power BI visuals makes all the difference between slow, confusing reports and quick, easy-to-use ones. Let’s look at some key practices that help them work better.
Use Certified Visuals For Enterprise-Grade Security
Microsoft puts certified Power BI visualizations through strict validation to confirm they don’t access external services or resources. These visuals follow secure coding patterns and guidelines that give you peace of mind with sensitive data. You’ll also get support for essential features like PowerPoint export, PDF export, and email subscriptions with certified visuals.
Avoid Overloading Reports With Too Many Visuals
Reports with more than 12-16 visuals on a single page run into performance issues. You can use drill-through pages and report tooltips as better ways to show additional details. Your reports will perform consistently and put less strain on capacity this way.
Test Performance With Large Datasets
Make sure to test how each custom visual performs. Native visuals load faster than custom ones because custom visuals need to run their own code. Performance Analyzer helps you spot poorly optimized visuals that slow down your report. Reports using DirectQuery models need extra attention since cache updates create queries for each visual.
Maintain Consistent Interaction Behavior
Visualizations cross-filter and cross-highlight other visuals on the page by default. Each time someone makes a selection, new queries run in the background. You can improve performance by turning off interactions you don’t need. This becomes especially important when you have DirectQuery models or complex reports.
Ready to check out compliant Power BI visuals that meet IBCS reporting standards? Take a look!
Conclusion:
Good visuals translate data into decisions. Use Drill Down for layered structures, KPI Matrix for scorecards, Sankey for flows, Deneb for spec-driven designs, and Word Cloud for quick text insight.
When requirements exceed off-the-shelf options, custom development with pbiviz and D3.js gives full control. Keep pages light, favor certified visuals for security, and test performance on realistic datasets.
Align interactions with how people explore results, not with default settings. With the right mix of components and practices, Power BI reports stay clear, fast, and trustworthy, helping teams see causes, compare outcomes, and act with confidence.
