Building Beautiful Visualizations with Vega-Lite: A Syntax Primer

Introduction

Are you tired of seeing the same built-in visuals in Power BI? If yes, you are like me. I have been creating Power BI reports for some time now, and I would love to see some variations and creativity into my visuals. Deneb solved my problem. Deneb is a Power BI certified custom visual extension in Power BI. It uses Vega and Vega-lite language to create custom visuals. Vega-lite is a high level version of Vega and easier to use and understand. You can create stunning visuals tailored to your needs using Deneb. In this post, I will introduce you to Deneb and Vega-lite. I will discuss the core parts of Vega-lite, learning which will give you the ability to start creating visuals of your need.

What is Deneb?

As I mentioned earlier, Deneb is a custom visualization extension available to download from AppSource. It is also Power BI certified meaning you can use it even if your organization puts restrictions on using custom visuals. Cool, right? Let’s see the definition of Deneb from its official website:

Deneb is a certified custom visual for Microsoft Power BI, which allows developers to use the declarative JSON syntax of the Vega or Vega-Lite languages to create their own data visualizations.