Charticulator is a game changing visualization platform, recently open-sourced by Microsoft Research. Charticulator enables you to create a custom visual without writing a single line of code.
In this blog, I will show how to create custom visual using Charticulator and use it in Microsoft Power BI.
Let’s begin with
After clicking on above link, click on Launch Charticulator button at the center. Now, you will be asked to upload sample data. In this blog, I will use data from my local machine.
Once you have uploaded the sample data click on Done.
After you load the data, you can see your available column on the left side of the page under Fields. You can also preview your uploaded data by clicking on the ellipses at the right on Fields tab.
Now, we are ready to create our visual.
In this blog post, we will be creating a simple chart as a scatter chart to see how it works.
To draw a chart, you need to choose an icon from Marks section. Choose symbol and drag it to Glyph section.
Now, we have to look for the dimensions like X-axis & Y.
For this demo, I’ll be showing total yearly revenue by sales channel. So for X-axis it will be year from the data and for Y-axis it will be revenue.
Now, showing sales channel as legend. Drag sales channel from Fields to “Fill” in Attribute section shown below.
Now, if we want to show total profit from each order. Drag Total Profit from Fields to size option in Attribute as shown below.
Now, our custom visual is ready to export. Click on Microsoft Charticulator on top left of your screen and select Export option.
Now, select Power BI Custom Visual option. Scroll down and click on Power BI Custom Visual and your custom visual is downloaded.
Now, open Power BI Desktop on your machine and import custom visual from local machine.
After importing, select the imported visual and drag your fields to their desired field.
This is how you can create your custom visual without having any programming knowledge. Thanks to Microsoft Research team for giving us this incredible power. I hope you will find this blog useful. Thanks for reading. Keep learning.
Gaurav Lakhotia
Data Analyst
Addend Analytics