Graphistry for PowerBI
This tutorial uses a sample dataset from the PyGraphistry repo, but any graph dataset will work. A graph dataset has at least two columns, one representing the source ID and the second the destination ID.
Prerequisites for PowerBI
The only things required for this tutorial are a PowerBI account, Graphistry account, and the Graphistry .pbiviz custom visual.
If you do not have a PowerBI or Graphistry account, you can
1.Sign up for one on PowerBI's website.
2. Sign up for your personal account on Graphistry's Hub account
3. Go to our public repo and download the latest .pbiviz Graphistry visual component.
4. Download and then save the following file locally of our Les Miserables CSV
Prepping your data
1. Go to powerbi.com
2. Log into your PowerBI account
3. From the PowerBI homepage, click the Create icon
4. Toward the bottom you will see: "Don't see the source you are looking for?" Select "try these options"
5. Click the CSV icon
6. Click browse device and select the lesmiserables.csv file from your local machine.
7. Under "Visualize this data", select "Create a report", then "Start from scratch".
Select Graphistry's component and visualize your data
-
To use Graphistry on powerbi.com, you will need to upload our
.pbiviz file. In your Graphistry repo, you will grab the pre-generated
.pbiviz file that will be used as a visual component in PowerBI.
1. On the Visualizations panel, under "Build visual", select the ellipses icon, looks like three dots toward the bottom of the icon list "..." then select "Import visual from a file"
2. Click the import button to acknowledge the warning.
3. Select the .pbiviz file that was downloaded in the pre-requisites section.
4. Once imported a small green "g" icon appears which is the custom Graphistry visual component for PowerBI, click on that to open the settings panel.
5. First, we need to register the username and password for the Graphistry online service by selecting the Format icon under Visualizations, Build visual (it's the second icon of three).
6. Once on the Format visual tab, under the Visual panel, enter your Graphistry username and password
7. Next, under Visualizations, Build visual click on the first icon "Add data to your visual"
8. Now, we specify what are the source and destination columns from the data we loaded, so click "lesmiserables" on the Data tab to expand it and see the 3 columns: source, target, value.
9. Next drag the source column from Les Miserables to the Source field on the Graphistry settings panel, and drag the target column to the Destination field.
10. That's it! Your visualization should now appear in the report pallette.
11. Next, we'll look at some settings that can be used to customize the look and feel of the generated Visualization.
Settings
The format panel allows you to shape your visual, seen in the Graph Tools and overall setting you would be familiar with using Graphistry. There's plenty of customization options but some keys one you may find useful are:
- Edge settings: Change the curve of the edge, the color and naming
- Filter: Click-drag an attribute to only see the selected range of values
- Node settings: Change the opacity of the, its color, and name
- Size: Control node size based on attribute values to understand what is important.
- Label: Label nodes based on attribute values to understand what is important. You can also change their color
- Layout: Change the background color of your graph via a simple click.