As a rule, we are using Power BI to present our findings, creating dashboards or reports. But Microsoft Power BI can be useful on the stage of initial exploratory data analysis as well.

I found it when I needed to examine a really wide data table, containing hundreds of columns. Usually, I am writing an R script, creating Scatterplot matrices using pairs(). But having a lot of features, and wishing to browse them in different combinations, that would be a bit onerously.

That is why I created a ggpairs R Visual, showing the same chart in Power BI. There are two reasons for that. First, I can quickly select features to display, simply marking them on the “Fields” pane in Power BI. Secondly, Power BI has a lot of Data Sources which could be accessed much easy than in R.

Of course, Power BI has a few drawbacks. It is trying to refresh a chart every time you are selecting/deselecting fields. It is annoying. And do not forget about the data size limitation in R Visuals – Power BI takes no more than first 150,000 rows.

The source code of the ggpairs.R can be found there