Using D3 Visualizations in MicroStrategy Dashboards

Developing interactive custom data visualizations used to involve long, frustrating hours of hammering out code and mutilating bugs increased the time to deliver dashboards. Those days are over thanks to MicroStrategy V10 that enables to easily include visualizations from D3 library in minutes in MicroStrategy Dashboards.  D3.js (Data Driven Documents) is a Javascript library for producing dynamic and interactive data visualizations. A quick scroll through D3 gallery will demonstrate range of creative options available. Below is an example of MicroStrategy Dashboard using D3 visualization:

 

waterfall D3 Viz

Here is the repository of D3 visualization plugins that fit directly to MicroStrategy platform. You can use a D3 visualization in a Visual Insight dashboard or a document in MicroStrategy Web and in MicroStrategy Desktop, on either a Windows or Mac machine. To use a D3 visualization from the github MicroStrategy repository, download & deploy respective visualization folders to the plugins folder for the environments where you want to use it.

MicroStrategy Web (on Windows or Mac)

  • Navigate to the MicroStrategy Web installation directory and the place the plugin in plugins folder. If a plugins folder doesn’t exist, create one.

MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop 10 on Windows

  • Navigate to the MicroStrategy installation directory and go to:
  • Create a folder named “plugins”.
  • Place the plugins in the newly created folder.

MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop on a Mac

  • Right click on the MicroStrategyDesktop.app file and select “Show Package Contents”.
  • Navigate to Content/Resources/code and create a folder named “plugins”.
  • Place the plugins in the newly created folder.

Restart MicroStrategy Web or Desktop. You should see the new visualization in the Visualizations Gallery. Select the new visualization, add a dataset to the dashboard, and move the required attributes and metrics to the Editors panel.

Please follow instructions detailed here, if you would like to use other D3 visualizations that are not published in MicroStrategy Github repository.

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