Power BI Updates August 2020 Organisational visuals in Power BI Admin

Power BI report developers can either use the default Power BI visuals, or go to AppSource to pick up visuals.

Some of these visuals are available within Power BI certified, which means that these visuals have been through rigorous tests and have passed all the requirements.

But there are many other visuals you can use. some you have to set up an additional purchase for, for the additional features.

The question is always, as an organisation, do we allow users to use any visual, just the certified visuals, or only default visuals?

Organisational Visuals

The great news is that in Power BI Admin, you can now add visuals that you are happy for everyone to use within organisational visuals.

Lets try it out in Admin Portal

You can go straight to AppSource to add in the visuals

For this post, the following visuals are added

These are all popular visuals and now, the admin has added them as organisation visuals.

There are a few things we can do at this point

click on settings and enable the visuals for the entire organisation

The enabled visuals are available for everyone in the default visuals pane in Power BI Desktop

Admin tenant settings

To add more control to visuals, its possible to disable every visual that isn’t certified.

Visuals can then be added if they are deemed to be required within organisational visuals.

Pros

More knowledge and governance on what is being used across the organisation

Easier to resolve issues. There are cases where visuals have been changed or simply scrapped. This has caused issues with reports because there is no backwards compatibility to this.

Cons

Users who enjoy spending time testing visuals and seeing what they can do, your Power users may feel that they are being stopped from getting the most out of Power BI

Bottle necks, if you need to get your admin to add a visual, this may take time. One of the great things about Power BI is Self Service is the ability to simply play with your data. this may get lost to certain people without full use of visuals.

Using the organisation visuals

Your Power BI developers can now access visuals on the My Organisation tab knowing that these have been recommended at admin level

Its completely up to you what level of access you require for visuals, but the fact that we can now add selected visuals automatically into every project is great news.

However I do have one question. If visuals can only be used when they are added to the view, How do you discover new visuals or check out new ones, to see if they should be added?