Power BI conducted a best visuals contest (http://community.powerbi.com/t5/Best-Visual-Contest/con-p/best_visual_contest) during the month of September. There were around thirty entries in the contest. It was impressive to say the least.
Winners were announced on October 8th, 2015 and included three people’s choice awards, a third place winner, a second place winner, and a grand prize winner:
1st People’s Choice Award
Code: https://github.com/danieleperilli/PowerBI-visuals
2nd People’s Choice Award
Code: https://github.com/enlightendesigns/PowerBI-visuals
3rd People’s Choice Award
The Breakdown tree makes it possible to visually display the full drill-down path of a measure. By keeping all levels in the drill-down path visible you will get a good overview of how your numbers break down, from the top level to the details at the bottom.
Code: https://github.com/fredrikheden/PowerBI-visuals
3rd Place Award
The Hexbin Scatterplot for Power BI is a variation on a traditional scatterplot that involves clustering points onto a uniform grid of hexagons. Rather than relying on size to indicate differences in values like a bubble chart, the hexbin plot instead uses variation in bin color similar to a heat map. A higher saturation or darker color indicates higher density when working with two measures. A third measure can be added so that the plot colors change from indicating point density to instead encoding the value of the third measure. Bin radius can also be adjusted.
Code: https://github.com/deldersveld/PowerBI-visuals
2nd Place Award
KPI indicator with status, deviation and history*.
This visualization is all about visualizing Key Performance Indicators. The status is presented as a color indication, comparing the actual and target values. Deviation is presented as distance in percent of actual from target. The history (trend) is presented as a line or a bar chart. It is up to the user to decide the granularity of the data displayed. Any dimension attributes can be used, but it’s recommended to stick to the ones in your date dimension.
Code: https://github.com/fredrikheden/PowerBI-visuals
Grand Prize Award
The Synoptic Panel connects areas in a picture with attributes in the data model, coloring each area with a state (red/yellow/green) or with a saturation of a color related to the value of a measure. Starting from any image, you draw custom areas using http://synoptic.design/, which generates a JSON file you import in the Synoptic Panel. You can visualize data over a map, a planimetry, a diagram, a flow chart.
Code: https://github.com/danieleperilli/PowerBI-visuals
Opening the application API and allowing customization is one of the features that will push Microsoft ahead of the competition.
See our next article to see how Microsoft utilized these new visualizations!