Almanac
Microsoft/power-biPower Platform

Consultant KB for Microsoft Power BI: semantic models, DAX and modelling, Power Query and dataflows, reports and visuals, the service and workspaces, capacity and performance, embedding and integration, governance and security, ALM and deployment, and licensing, plus cross-cutting decision guides. Scoped to Power BI, with Microsoft Fabric covered where it touches Power BI directly. Implementation notes, configuration decisions and the gotchas that bite on real projects. Populated by the daily author agent from the Power BI release plans, docs repo and product blog, plus the author's own consultant notes.

power-bi/04-reports-and-visuals/feature-custom-visuals.md
feature-custom-visuals.mdv1 · history
CurrentApplies to BothUpdated last monthSource Microsoft Learn ↗

What it does

Custom visuals are chart types outside the core set, packaged as .pbiviz files. They arrive from AppSource, from an organisational store the tenant admin curates, or as a file someone hands you. They render data using their own code inside the report.

Key facts

  • Three sources: core visuals in the pane, AppSource downloads, and your own .pbiviz files imported directly.
  • Microsoft tests and approves AppSource visuals for functionality and quality before publication.
  • Certified visuals are a separate, stricter bar — the certification tests check that the visual doesn't access external services or resources. Certification is not the same thing as being on AppSource.
  • Microsoft warns explicitly that a visual built with the SDK may send data to, or import data from, a third party outside your tenant's geography, compliance boundary or national cloud.
  • Once imported from AppSource, visuals may update automatically with no notice.
  • Licensing is set by each publisher: free, licensed through the Microsoft 365 admin centre with purchase in AppSource, or free-with-paid-features where licensing happens outside Microsoft's platforms.
  • Licensed visuals aren't supported in Power BI Report Server, sovereign and government clouds, PaaS embedded app-owns-data, or publish to web. In those environments Power BI can't tell the publisher whether a user is licensed, and won't block the visual either.
  • Admins can approve, deploy, version, enable and disable visuals through the organisational store, reachable from Get more visuals > My organization.
  • Microsoft's own warning: a custom visual could contain code with security or privacy risks — trust the author and source before importing.

When to use / skip

Reach for a custom visual when the core set genuinely can't express the thing and the thing matters — Sankey flows, complex Gantt charts, certain statistical plots. Refuse when the driver is aesthetic preference, because you're trading a permanent support and governance liability for a nicer-looking chart. If you do go ahead, insist on certified, and check the publisher is a company that will still exist in three years. A custom visual is a third-party dependency embedded in the client's reporting estate, and it should get the same scrutiny any other third-party component would.

Configuration decisions

  • Whether custom visuals are allowed in the tenant at all, and whether that's restricted to certified only — a tenant admin setting, not a report decision.
  • Whether the organisational store is used, which turns "anyone can import anything" into "admins approve a version".
  • Which specific visuals are on the approved list, with a named business justification each.
  • How versions get updated and who tests before they go into production.
  • Whether visuals that fail the certification bar are acceptable given the client's data residency and compliance position.

Gotchas

  • Auto-update means a visual can change behaviour, or break, without anyone deploying anything. Reports fail on a Monday for no traceable reason.
  • Uncertified visuals may call out to external services. On regulated client data that's a conversation with compliance, not a design choice.
  • Custom visuals and bookmarks don't always get along — Microsoft's guidance is to contact the visual's author and ask them to support bookmarks, which is exactly as useful as it sounds.
  • Accessibility is usually poor. Check the accessible Show Data table on any custom visual before you commit to it, and if the data there is thin, pick something else.
  • A visual whose publisher stops maintaining it isn't a bug you can fix. Every report using it needs rebuilding.
  • Publish to web and embedded scenarios silently change licensed-visual behaviour, so what works internally may not work externally.

Consultant notes

  • Have the custom visuals conversation with the client's IT and security function early, before a maker has fallen in love with one. Retrofitting a policy is much harder than setting one.
  • Certified-only plus organisational store is the position to recommend by default. It's defensible, it's administrable, and it still leaves room for the genuine exceptions.
  • Keep a register of every custom visual in use, with publisher, version, why it's there and what the fallback is. Two years on, that document is worth more than the reports.
  • If a client insists on an uncertified visual, get the decision recorded in writing with the data-egress risk stated plainly. That's not defensiveness, it's the point at which they'll actually think about it.

Revisit whenever a visual's publisher changes hands, or if the tenant's certified-only setting is loosened.

Was this accurate?
Related
Power BI vs native Dynamics 365 reporting11-decision-guidesLicensing for embedded scenarios10-licensingPower BI licensing overview10-licensingSubscriptions and alerts05-service-and-workspacesSensitivity labels08-governance-and-securityFree users and content viewing10-licensing