Images are powerful communication devices — and, with a few steps, you’re able to leverage them in your Power BI reports. For those in the AEC and Real Estate market, possible use cases might include linking images to floor plans or 3D models (as in the example illustration), attaching images to maintenance tickets, or tracking construction progress. There are likely many other creative uses beyond this author’s imagination!
Here, we share an example that links photographs of different spaces in a building to a dataset that we harvested from Revit using our Tracer app. The steps below explain the steps you can take to create your own version!
Reference Images in Your Power BI Reports
First, upload your pictures to OneDrive storage. In your browser, navigate to the OneDrive site, open an image, and select the “…” (More Options) icon, and choose the Embed option. A window will open that gives you the option to Generate an HTML code to embed the photo. Once generated, copy the URL.
Visit this Microsoft article for additional information about generating URLs to your OneDrive images.
Next, paste your image URL into a table. For this example, we created an Excel spreadsheet that associated each image URL with a room number to correspond with our harvested Revit dataset.
When your table is complete, you can proceed with bringing the data into Power BI. In your Power BI ribbon menu, select Get Data and choose the Excel option, and then follow the instructions to connect to your table.
Then, navigate to your report’s Model View, where you can create a two-way relationship between the Room Number column of your Excel spreadsheet to the Room Number field in your Revit Dataset, as in this example. If you are relating the images to a different data field, your configuration will vary.
With the URL data field selected, navigate to the Properties section of the ribbon window and set the Data Category option to “Image URL”.
Now, you’re ready to create a table of the images in Power BI! Add a Table visual to your report canvas, and then add your image URL field from your Excel datasource to the Columns area in the Build Visual tab. From here you should see the images populate in the table.
Results
Check out the published example report to see how the images interact with the Tracer 2D and 3D Power BI visuals!
What now?
- Download a free 15-day trial of our data harvesting apps, Tracer for Revit and IFC models and Semantic for Rhino!
- Contact us to learn more about our services