Update Sep 2022: I wrote this blogpost in Mar 2016. Power BI Desktop improved a lot since then. Currently, Power BI Administrators can Enable or Disable custom visuals for the reports published to Power BI Service from Power BI Admin Portal across the organisation or to certain security groups. There are also some settings for system administrators to Enable or Disable custom visuals on the user’s Power BI Desktop across the organisation via group policy settings. The users can also remove custom visuals from Power BI Desktop by following these steps:
- Clicking the ellipsis button on the Visuals pane
- Clicking Remove a visual
- Selecting the custom visual
- Clicking the Remove button
Disclaimer: The method described in this post includes modifying Power BI file (PBIX) outside of Power BI Desktop. It is highly recommended to take a backup of your PBIX file beforehand. It’s highly probable that you corrupt your PBIX file if make a mistake when following the method described here. So please follow the process on YOUR OWN RISK!
Custom visuals are awesome. It’s easy to import them to Power BI Desktop model and start using them. But, what if you decide to remove them from your model? Is there a way to disable an imported custom visual?
Well, the answer is No and Yes! I mean, NO, there is no specific setting or option you can manage imported custom visuals in Power BI Desktop. But, YES, there is a way you can get rid of an existing custom visual. In this article I show you how to do the job.
First of all, I’d like to inform you that Microsoft will add the feature to disable custom visuals in Power BI Desktop, but, until then you can follow the my trick to completely disable/remove a custom visual from your Power BI Desktop model.
As you might already know a PBIX file is a compressed file indeed, so you can open it with a ZIP editor software like 7-Zip.
Requirements:
- Download and install 7-Zip. It’s a free open source file archiver/compressor
- Download and install Notepad++ which is also free and open source. It’s an awesome text editor
Removing/disabling Custom Visual
- Open you Power BI Desktop model (PBIX file) containing a custom visual
- As you see you need to enable custom visuals, click “Enable custom visuals”
- I used “KPIStatusWithHistory” custom visual in my sample model
