Introduction
Welcome back to Workout Wednesday! This week we’re having fun with the Deneb custom visual and learning from another one of our fabulous Power BI community members, Ying Fu. Ying has been sharing on LinkedIn and I’ve had so much fun exploring their GitHub repo.
Today we’re using a rotatable globe to look at Chinese migration abroad. Ying was inspired by a D3.js visualization and created something similar using Deneb. The Vega code in this visualization is advanced, so if you’re new to Deneb like me, I encourage you to spend some time playing around with the code in the online Vega editor.
If you’re an experienced Deneb user, grab the destination data from GitHub and have fun!
Requirements
- Download the starter file that contains the dataset.
- Add the Deneb custom visual to your report.
- Create a new Deneb visual on the canvas
- Open the specification editor in the Deneb visual (using the … menu) and copy and paste Ying’s Vega code.
- If you’re new to Deneb or even new to Deneb this complex, check out the online Vega editor to play around with the code.
- This code has 45k rows of code! I prefer to do my exploration and edits in a separate code editor, like VS code.
- Customize and test interactions.
- Customize things like color and font sizes to ensure that your new visual meets accessibility standards.
Dataset
Ying has graciously shared the dataset on GitHub, or, you’re welcome to use this Power BI starter file.
Share
After you finish your workout, share on social media using the hashtags #WOW2025 and #PowerBI, and tag Meagan Longoria, Shannon Lindsay, and Kerry Kolosko. You can find us on LinkedIn, BlueSky, or Twitter. Also make sure to fill out the Submission Tracker so that we can count you as a participant this week in order to track our participation throughout the year.
Solution
You can download Ying’s solution file that includes the Vega code you’ll need for the Deneb visual from GitHub.