Using Power BI together with R as tools in a company environment

Hi everyone,

I do have a more general discussion question:

My organization is just about to set up / streamline their Business Intelligence and Data Analytics tools. One of the ideas currently circulating is to forcus on two core tools:

  1. Power BI for a "self-service" pipeline (e.g. if business units wants to easily create some BI Reports)

  2. R Shiny for more advanced "data interaction" workflow (e.g. if there are more complicated analyses involved or if we want the user to "interact" with the data, e.g. enter new data that should then be processed on the fly)

The hope/idea here is that eventually there could be some synergies between the two, because. as far as I understand, you can use R Scripts and R Visuals wihtin PowerBI Service.

So the hope is for example, that if the data team has created some advanced R Scripts for some data transformation tasks or designed an appealing visual, then this could could be re-used within Power BI, so that the data team can for example use some of the R code quickly "pimp" Power BI reports.

Howerver, after digging a little bit deeper the usage of R in Power BI seems to be limited in many regards, as can be seen from the "limitations" section in the link below.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/visuals/service-r-visuals

Therefore the question: Have you ever tried to used R code together with PowerBI in a productive company environment? Either as a script or for Visuals ?

If so, what are your experiences?

Would you recommed such an idea for a new setup in 2024?

Thanks and Best!

My understanding is that you can R (or Python even) within Power BI in 2 ways:

  1. As part of a query - to get data
  2. To display as a visual

This works OK in the Desktop and, according to your link, can be published to the service.
What you can't do is refresh in the Service. At least not for scenario 1. I can't remember with 2

My approach (2 or so years ago)was to take the examples from "Guy in a Cube" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NomSliJK3s4 and see what could be done in the service

Hi Mike,
Thanks for the hint!

Rasmus