Category: Workout Wednesday

People have done creative things with SVG measures in Power BI, ranging from KPI cards to infographics to fun games.

For my latest Workout Wednesday challenge, I used SVG measures to make holiday cards that open on a specified date.

When you click on one of the holiday cards, it navigates to a specified url. This was made possible by using the HTML Content custom visual.

The navigation to the URL is achieved by modifying the SVG code to include an href attribute. Depending on the placement of the href attribute, you can make one part of the SVG image or the entire image navigate to a URL when clicked.

Step by Step

To make a clickable SVG image for Power BI, there are 7 steps:

1. Open the url in a text editor or html editor
2. Replace all double quotes with single quotes
3. Add href attribute around the content you want to be clickable
4. Create a measure in Power BI and paste the contents of the SVG
5. Add the HTML Content visual to a report page
6. Populate the values of the visual with the measure
7. In the format pane for the visual, set Allow Opening URLS to On.

For example, I have an SVG of a coffee cup.

If I open it in Notepad++ (you can also use Visual Studio code or another editor), it looks like this.

Because we are putting the contents in a DAX measure, we need to replace the double quotes with single quotes.

Then I add the href attribute. I want my entire image to navigate to my website (DataSavvy.me) when it is clicked. So I add <a href='https://datasavvy.me'> just after the opening <svg> tag, and I add a closing </a> at the end. Remember that the URL should be surrounded by single quotes rather than double quotes.

Then I create a measure called SVG. I enter double quotes, paste the content from Notepad++, and add closing quotes as the end. Because I’m using the HTML content visual, I don’t have to add "data:image/svg+xml;utf8," at the beginning of my measure as I would if I were using this in a table visual.

Now I add the HTML Content visual and put my SVG measure in the Values field well.

With the visual selected, I go to the formatting pane, expand the Content Formatting section, and turn Allow Opening URLs to On.

When I hover over the image, the cursor changes, indicating the image is clickable.

When I click the image, I get a prompt to allow navigation to the url I put in the SVG.

New possibilities unlocked

While static clickable SVGs are pretty cool, the potential is really in the fact that we can dynamically populate the SVG based upon data in our dataset. You can change the entire image or an attribute of the image (color, size, URL, etc.) based upon a slicer selection.

Now that you can make dynamic clickable images in Power BI, how do you plan to use them?

October 2021 is mapping month over at Workout Wednesday for Power BI. As part of our challenges, we build a sample report and use the Publish to Web functionality to share it on the website. While this has worked well all year, there are some visuals, including maps, that do not support or require a different license for use with Publish to Web.

It’s frustrating to build a Power BI report that you plan to share, only to find that you can’t share it. So I thought it would be helpful to consolidate what I have found about the various map visuals and their support of Publish to Web.

Disclaimer: This information is correct as of October 14, 2021. This could change over time. This is not an exhaustive list of all the map visuals available for Power BI.

Map Visuals

• Map: Supports Publish to Web
• Filled map: Supports Publish to Web
• Shape Map: Supports Publish to Web
• Azure Map: Publish to Web not supported
• ArcGIS map: Publish to Web requires add-on license in ArcGIS for the creator
• MapBox: Supports Publish to Web

Note: I also tested several other AppSource visuals, but they failed to render in Power BI desktop. I may update this post if they start working again.

I hope this helps you plan your visuals when you need to publicly share a report that contains a map.

I’m excited to announce that something new is coming to the Power BI community in 2021: Workout Wednesday!

Workout Wednesday started in the Tableau community and is expanding to Power BI in the coming year. Workout Wednesdays present challenges to recreate a data-driven visualization as closely as possible. They are designed to help you improve your skills in Power BI and Tableau.

How You Can Participate

Watch for the Power BI challenge to be published on Wednesdays in 2021. The challenge will contain requirements and a dataset. Use the dataset to create the desired end result.

Then share your workout! You can post your workout to the Data Stories Gallery or your blog, or just share a public link. If you aren’t able to share a public link – perhaps because that option is disabled in your Power BI tenant or you don’t have a Power BI tenant– a gif, a video, or even some screenshots are just fine.

To formally participate: Post to Twitter using both the #WOW2021 and #PowerBI hashtags along with a link/image/video of your workout. Include a link to the challenge on the Workout Wednesday site. And please note the week number in your description, if possible.

Community Growth

I’m looking forward to Workout Wednesdays for a couple of reasons. First, I think Power BI needs more love in the data visualization department. We need to be talking about effective visualization techniques and mature past ugly pie charts and tacky backgrounds. And I think Workout Wednesdays will help us individually grow those skills, but it will also foster more communication and sharing of ideas around data visualization in Power BI. That in turn will lead to more product enhancement ideas and conversations with the Power BI team, resulting in a better product and a stronger community.

Second, I’m also excited to see the crosspollination and cross-platform learning we will achieve by coming together as a data visualization community that isn’t focused on one single tool. There is a lot Tableau practitioners and Power BI practitioners can learn from each other.

Join Me In January

Keep an eye out on Twitter and the Workout Wednesday website for the first challenge coming January 6. While it would be great if you did the workout for every single week, don’t be concerned if you can’t participate every week. A solution will be posted about a week later, but nothing says you can’t go back and do workouts from previous weeks as your schedule allows.

I look forward to seeing all of your lovely Workout Wednesday solutions next year!