Visio Visual for Power BI is now generally available

[Shakun Grover]

A year ago, we released for public preview one of the most significant features in Visio’s history: integration with Power BI. This integration gives users the ability to combine business and operational insights in  a single dashboard for unified data perspectives. The use cases for this are nearly endless, from building IoT-connected processes in manufacturing to visualizing store inventory in retail, but until today they were only available in public preview.  

That’s why we’re excited to announce that Visio Visual for  Power BI is now generally available to everyone which also marks the end of Public Preview for Visio Visual. Learn how to get the visual here.

We’ve made a few changes to this feature since public preview, including:

• Support for Power BI Mobile app
• The ability to change the diagram link embedded earlier and to copy an embedded link to the clipboard
• Configurable auto-zoom settings that can be turned on and off
• Support for complex diagrams using layers
• Overall performance improvements

We think collaboration is one of the keys to making better decisions, which is why anyone in your organization can view reports with Visio Visuals—even those without a Visio Online license. Users without a license can add Visio Visuals to their Power BI dashboard and embed a Visio file link but  not edit the visual.

You’ll no doubt need some time to figure out how your company can get the most out of Visio’s integration with Power BI. That’s why we’re giving Office 365 subscribers five free trial instances of Visio Visual. These trial instances are fully editable and remain so indefinitely, even after the original creator has used their five instances. Plus, there’s nothing to install for the trial: Visio Visual trial is immediately available in Power BI to all Office 365 users. After using all trial instances, unlicensed users can still view visuals and embed file links or, to retain full editing rights, purchase a Visio Online subscription. Please note, currently we cannot provide these free trials to companies running a sovereign environment.

Editing a Visio Visual in Power BI requires a Visio Online license, either Plan 1 or Plan 2.  You can visit our plan comparison to decide which option is best for you. If you’re on the fence about either plan, try them for free for 30 days (Plan 1 trial, Plan 2 trial).  

Power BI integration and other recent releases were borne out of customer requests. We invite you to submit ideas for improving Visio Online and Power BI on their respective UserVoice sites (Visio Online, Visio Visual for Power BI). For questions about this and other releases, please email us at tellvisio@microsoft.com. Lastly, keep current on Visio’s releases by following us on Facebook and Twitter and visiting our blog and Tech Community sites.

[Ivan Unger]

Hi @Shakun Grover, 

we're currently in a medium sized project that requires the Visio Visual. I'm in the middle of preparing the Visio files and I wanted to ask for guidance.

We want to visualize our room booking information (building has about 5 levels) from our ERP system within PowerBI and utilize the Visio Visual. How would I best go about creating the Visio file.

I've currently thought about those options:

• redraw the whole building (all 5 levels) with Visio lines, and create a shape for every room to be visualized?
• use a simplified blueprint as the background image and just create the shapes (possibly on that # layer)?

On some dashboards we thought about displaying up to 5 (for every level) Visio Visual concurrently. 

Any recommendations are welcome.

[Shakun Grover]

Hi @Ivan Unger,

Thanks for getting in touch.

There are a range of possibilities to create a diagram in Visio for your scenario.

See if the floor plan templates/stencils that come out of the box work for you?

As for your first option, if you are using lines to draw the diagram and shapes to represent rooms, you may want to have these shapes on the # layer for improved performance.

You can surely add 5 Visio Visuals to your report and have them show the 5 levels simultaneously but you would need a separate file for each floor because currently we support rendering the active page in a file. So, each Visio Visual would need to connect to a file for that floor. Hope this gives you some ideas to get started.

You can drop us an email at tellvisio@microsoft.com for feedback or questions.

Thanks,

Shakun

[Chad Stout]

@Shakun Grover, awesome feature/capability!  Love the healthcare-specific example, plan to share this with many of my customers. :)

[Shakun Grover]

Thank you very much @Chad Stout. Glad you like it.

Please let us know if you need any assistance or more examples to share with your customers.

Shakun

Program Manager, Visio

tellvisio@microsoft.com

[Julian_v20191]

Hi @Shakun Grover ,

Last few weeks I have been working on a flowchart/process flow that represents all different warehouse operational flows that are happening and connected with each other. These process flows are from the inbound process of receiving the goods till the outbound process of loading the trucks and all processes in between them.

I already created the process flow in Visio and also downloaded the Visio visual add-in in Power BI and I am currently waiting on the right data. Eventually, I want to visualize the volumes that flow through each particular process. Do you know if this is even possible with the Visio visual add-in in Power BI?

Any other recommendations are of course also welcome!

Thanks in advance!

[Shakun Grover]

Hi @Julian_v20191 

Thanks for your message.

Is your process flow represented in a single diagram or is it hyperlinked to sub-process in other files/pages?

I have not fully understood your requirement, but based on the limited information I could gather, below is what I can recommend:

Visio Visual will support representation of a single page per Visio visual. If all your data is available or is joined in to one table which has distinct unique IDs, your data can be mapped to all shapes in the Visio diagram/s on a page. In short, Visio Visual supports mapping one data row per shape.

Do you mind dropping me an email at tellvisio[at]microsoft[dot]com to discuss this further?

Thanks,

Shakun

Product Manager, Visio

[Julian_v20191]

Hi @Shakun Grover ,

It is a procesflow represented in one single diagram.

I have send you an email with the procesflow itself and wherin I further explained my requirements.

Thanks for replying! 

[Julian_v20191]

Hi @Shakun Grover ,

I send you an email, but I keep getting an error message. Please let me know if you received my email.

Thanks in advance!

[Shakun Grover]

Hi @Julian_v20191 

Acknowledging receipt of email, not sure about the error you received. 

I will get back to you soon.

Thanks,

Shakun