Today, I was reading a good article by Florian Mader – A GPS Photo Gallery in Power BI. That inspired me to write something on Power View and since I had not originally planned to write a blog today, I decided to write something short. 
QR Codes are not available by default in Power View and it is normal to hear many people say that it is not possible in Power View. The reason behind such a conclusion is because Power View is not at all flexible and you don’t even have simple options to change your chart colors, let alone program a new chart type (which is not a bad thing, as the focus is on ease of use and simplicity. More options would make the tool more complex). However, in this case, we can utilize the power of the internet and Image URL feature of Power Pivot to generate QR Codes. For this post, I am using the model below with some sample data.
The fact table consists of Customer name, Brand Name, Date and Sales. The requirement is to display the QR code for the selected Brand. For that, follow the steps below:-
1) To create the QR code, it is necessary to create a calculated field in the data model. Since the QR code should be there for each brand, the calculated field should also be in the Brand table. The formula for the calculated field QRCode is given below
=”http://qrcode.kaywa.com/img.php?s=8&d=” & [Brand] & “” & [URL]
My regular readers might remember this URL from my post – Generating QR Codes in SSRS. There are other QR code generating sites also, I am just using this as an example.
2) Once the URL is generated, make sure that the Data Category property in the Advanced tab is set to Image URL.
3) Now we can use the QRCode field in Power View to display the QR Codes. You might get a warning to enable external content, which is normal.
4) We can also use it along with other visualisations like shown below.
The output of the QR Code from my smartphone is given below:-
Limitations Now that said, there are a few limitations. It is absolutely necessary to have a calculated field to make the QR Codes. This means that the values will be pre-computed and we can not add a measure or some value that changes during the run time of the report to the URL of the report. Also, we can not make much changes to the size of the QR Codes as we don’t have a lot of control on that. This technique can also be used to get other chart types into Power View. However, the same limitations will apply. That is all for now, time for me to get back to baby-duty 
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