Earlier this year, Microsoft announced Power BI Embedded at Build, its annual developer conference. Having been offered as an Azure cloud service since July, Power BI Embedded enables the inclusion of Power BI analytics within independently developed applications.
However, developers have so far been unable to include advanced analytics in the form of R visuals, leveraging solutions such as Microsoft R Server. Until now, left R-enabled analytics such as business forecasts, clustering, and decision trees absent have remained absent from Power BI Embedded reports.
And now, Microsoft announced that it would be filling this gap in addition to providing both an example report and a guide on how to create Power BI visuals using R. However, given that Power BI Desktop does not include the R engine as part of its installation, developers will need to install R separately on the local machine and then configure Power BI with the path to the R installation.
In terms of the application experience, end users will be able to access R enhanced content in the same way as existing Power BI reports. Furthermore, consumption of R enhanced content will not attract any additional costs for end users given existing coverage provided by the Power BI Embedded licensing and terms of use.
Microsoft is keen to know what people think of the new feature, with the company inviting feedback via e-mail.
Source: Microsoft Power BI Blog