1. Welcome! Power BI User Group (PUG)
Copenhagen

2. All things R with Power BI
David L. Bojsen
Cloud Solution Architect, Advanced Analytics and AI
Microsoft Denmark

3. Meet Your Presenter David L. Bojsen
Previously application/integration developer
Past 11 years focus on data and BI
Past 2 years focus on Cloud, IoT at Microsoft
aka.ms/davidb

4. Session Agenda Session objectives What is R
Setting up your environment
Data manipulation/enhancement thru R
Visualizing data thru R
Support for R in the Power BI Service
When to use R in Power BI

5. Poll How many consider themselves a data scientist? a BI professional?
a BI superuser?

6. Poll
How many are completely new to R?

7. All things R with Power BI
At the end of this session, you should be better able to…
Understand the possibilities for using R in Power BI
Know how to go home and set up your own environment

8. What is R
Wikipedia: R (programming language)

9. What is R
“R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics”
Capabilities include
Statistical Analysis
Modeling and
Data Visualization

10. What is R
Source:

11. Setting up your environment

12. We will need... Power BI Desktop
An R installation – suggest Microsoft R Open
(Optional) An R IDE
R Studio
R Tools for Visual Studio (RTVS)
Update configuration in Power BI Desktop

13. Demo

14. Data manipulation/enhancement

15. Going all in - the R script data connector
Running R Scripts in Power BI Desktop

16. Things to be aware of Reference all dependent packages
Only data frames are imported (not complex/vectors)
All data frames available in navigator
NA is translated to NULL
30 minute time out

17. Demo

18. Partial approach - R script as part of query editor
Using R in Query Editor

19. Demo

20. Data visualization

21. R visuals from Office store
Advanced Analytics Custom visuals for Power BI

22. Your own custom R visualizations
Create Power BI visuals using R

23. Current limitations
Data size limitations – data used by the R visual for plotting is limited to 150,000 rows. If more than 150,000 rows are selected, only the top 150,000 rows are used and a message is displayed on the image.
Calculation time limitation – if an R visual calculation exceeds 5 minutes the execution times out, resulting in an error.
Relationships – as with other Power BI Desktop visuals, if data fields from different tables with no defined relationship between them are selected, an error occurs.
R visuals are refreshed upon data updates, filtering, and highlighting. However, the image itself is not interactive and cannot be the source of cross-filtering.
R visuals respond to highlighting other visuals, but you cannot click on elements in the R visual in order to cross filter other elements.
Only plots that are plotted to the R default display device are displayed correctly on the canvas. Avoid explicitly using a different R display device.

24. Interactive R custom visuals
Interactive R custom visuals support is here!

25. Your own interactive R custom visuals
Building R Powered Custom Visual with HTML output

26. Bringing it from your machine into the Power BI Service

27. What is supported in the Power BI Service
Data manipulation / enhancement
Only supported with the On-Premises data gateway setup in personal mode
Visuals / interactive visuals
A subset of CRAN packages are supported
R packages in the Power BI service
You can request packages to be added

28. Demo

29. When to use R in Power BI

30. When to use R in Power BI
No dedicated modeling capability (read: small R implementations)
Robust visualizations; beyond what Power BI can provide
Augment Power BI, don’t try to replace it
Data manipulation beyond DAX capabilities
Integrating R modeling capabilities into PowerQuery

31. Questions?

32. Thank you for Attending!
Don’t forget to join your local PUG to enjoy year-round networking and learning.