Akvelon is a software development and technology services company that has established a strong presence in the Power BI custom visuals ecosystem by building specialized visualization components that extend the platform’s native charting capabilities. Their custom visuals are available through Microsoft AppSource and the Power BI Visuals Marketplace, where they have earned consistent positive ratings from the Power BI community for quality, reliability, and design polish. The Bubble Chart visual is among their most widely adopted contributions to the Power BI custom visuals library.

Custom visuals from certified publishers like Akvelon undergo Microsoft’s certification process, which verifies that the visual code meets security standards and does not access external services or resources without disclosure. This certification status is important for enterprise Power BI deployments where organizational policies restrict the use of uncertified third-party visuals due to data security and compliance requirements. Akvelon’s certification status makes their Bubble Chart visual a viable option for use in corporate Power BI environments that enforce these stricter visual governance policies across their tenant deployments.

Bubble Chart Core Purpose

The Bubble Chart custom visual by Akvelon is designed to display three-dimensional data relationships by encoding information simultaneously across X axis position, Y axis position, and bubble size, allowing viewers to identify correlations, clusters, and outliers across three variables in a single compact visualization. This three-variable encoding capability distinguishes bubble charts from standard scatter plots, which communicate only two-dimensional relationships between data points. Adding the size dimension creates significantly richer analytical context without requiring additional chart space on a crowded report page.

The visual is particularly well-suited for comparative analysis scenarios where multiple entities such as products, regions, sales representatives, or business units need to be assessed simultaneously across multiple performance dimensions. A typical business application might plot revenue on the X axis, profit margin on the Y axis, and encode customer count as bubble size, instantly revealing which business segments combine high revenue with strong margins and which combine high revenue with poor margin performance. This multi-dimensional comparative view would require three separate charts to communicate equivalently using standard Power BI native visuals.

Installing the Akvelon Visual

Installing the Akvelon Bubble Chart visual in Power BI Desktop begins by opening the Visualizations pane and clicking the three-dot ellipsis menu at the bottom to access the Get More Visuals option. This opens the Power BI Visuals window connected to AppSource, where searching for Akvelon or Bubble Chart returns the relevant visual listing alongside other bubble chart options from different publishers. Selecting the Akvelon Bubble Chart and clicking Add imports the visual into the current Power BI Desktop session and adds its icon to the Visualizations pane for use in the current report file.

For organizational deployments where a Power BI administrator manages approved visuals centrally, the Akvelon Bubble Chart can be added to the organizational visuals store through the Power BI Admin Portal. Once added to the organizational store, the visual becomes available to all users within the tenant without requiring individual installation, and updates to the visual can be managed centrally by the administrator. This centralized deployment approach ensures version consistency across all reports in the organization and simplifies the governance of custom visual usage within enterprise Power BI environments.

Data Fields Configuration

Configuring the Akvelon Bubble Chart requires mapping data fields to the visual’s specific field wells, each of which controls a distinct aspect of how data is encoded within the visualization. The X Axis field well accepts the measure or dimension that determines horizontal bubble positioning, while the Y Axis field well controls vertical placement. The Size field well accepts a measure whose values determine the relative diameter of each bubble, with larger values producing larger bubbles proportionally scaled across the range of values in the dataset.

The Category field well accepts a dimension whose unique values define the individual bubbles displayed in the chart, with each category member represented as a separate bubble. An optional Color field well allows bubble colors to encode a fourth dimension of categorical or continuous data, adding another layer of analytical information to the visualization. The Label field well controls the text displayed directly on or adjacent to each bubble, typically populated with the category name or a key metric value that helps viewers identify specific data points without requiring interaction with tooltips. Thoughtful field mapping decisions based on the specific analytical question being answered produce significantly more insightful bubble chart configurations than simply mapping available fields without considering the visual’s communication purpose.

Formatting Options Overview

The Akvelon Bubble Chart provides an extensive set of formatting options accessible through the Format pane that control every aspect of the visual’s appearance from bubble styling to axis configuration and legend placement. The Bubbles section controls default bubble color, opacity, border width, and border color, with options to apply custom color palettes that align with organizational brand standards or report color themes. Bubble opacity settings are particularly important when data points overlap significantly, as reducing opacity makes underlying bubbles visible through overlapping ones, preserving the readability of dense data regions.

Axis formatting options control title text, font size, number format, gridline visibility, axis scale type, and minimum and maximum value bounds for both the X and Y axes. Setting explicit axis bounds rather than relying on automatic scaling is often important for bubble chart readability because automatic scaling sometimes produces axis ranges that compress data into a small portion of the available chart space, reducing the visible separation between data points. The Data Labels section controls whether labels appear on bubbles, their font properties, background fill options, and the specific measure or field whose value is displayed, giving report authors precise control over the informational content of each bubble label.

Bubble Size Scaling

Bubble size scaling is one of the most technically important aspects of configuring the Akvelon Bubble Chart correctly, and mishandling it is one of the most common sources of misleading bubble chart visualizations. By default, bubble area should scale proportionally to the underlying data values rather than bubble radius or diameter scaling proportionally, because human visual perception judges bubble size by area rather than linear dimension. If radius is scaled proportionally rather than area, bubbles representing larger values appear disproportionately large relative to smaller values, exaggerating the visual differences between data points beyond what the underlying data justifies.

The Akvelon Bubble Chart’s size scaling settings allow report authors to control the minimum and maximum bubble sizes in pixels, which determines the range of visual differentiation between the smallest and largest values in the size measure. Setting the minimum bubble size too small makes small-value bubbles nearly invisible, while setting the maximum too large causes large-value bubbles to overlap and obscure neighboring data points. Finding the right size range requires iterative adjustment based on the specific value distribution of the size measure and the number of data points displayed, with the goal of maximizing visible differentiation while maintaining a clean, uncluttered chart layout.

Color Encoding Techniques

Color encoding in the Akvelon Bubble Chart can be applied in multiple ways that serve different analytical purposes depending on the nature of the data being visualized. Categorical color encoding assigns a distinct color to each member of a dimension, making it easy to identify specific entities across a busy chart and enabling viewers to trace individual categories visually even when bubbles are positioned in close proximity. This approach works well when the number of categories is small enough that each can receive a meaningfully distinct color without the palette becoming confusingly crowded.

Continuous color encoding maps a quantitative measure to a color gradient, adding a fourth numerical dimension to the visualization beyond the X position, Y position, and size already encoded. A diverging color scale centered on zero or a target value is particularly effective for encoding performance variance measures, where the color intensity communicates how far above or below benchmark each data point falls in addition to its position and size. Combining continuous color encoding with careful color scale selection, such as using a red-to-green diverging scale for performance variance metrics, creates highly information-dense bubble chart visualizations that communicate four analytical dimensions simultaneously within a single compact visual element.

Tooltips and Interactivity

Tooltips in the Akvelon Bubble Chart display detailed information about individual data points when viewers hover over specific bubbles, providing access to precise values that cannot be accurately read from visual position and size alone. The default tooltip displays the values of all mapped fields for the hovered bubble, giving viewers exact figures for the X axis measure, Y axis measure, size measure, and category name without requiring any additional configuration. Customizing tooltip content through Power BI’s report tooltip page feature allows rich contextual information including additional charts, formatted tables, and narrative text to appear when hovering over individual bubbles.

Cross-filtering interactivity allows the Akvelon Bubble Chart to participate in Power BI’s standard cross-visual filtering behavior, where selecting one or more bubbles filters all other visuals on the report page to show data corresponding to the selected categories. This interactivity transforms the bubble chart from a standalone analytical display into an active navigation and filtering tool within a multi-visual report layout. Clicking a bubble representing a specific product category, for example, instantly filters accompanying tables and trend charts to show only that category’s detailed data, allowing viewers to move seamlessly between the macro comparative view of the bubble chart and the micro detail available in supporting visuals.

Reference Lines Usage

Reference lines in the Akvelon Bubble Chart provide visual anchors that divide the chart space into meaningful quadrants or highlight specific threshold values on either axis, dramatically improving the analytical interpretability of bubble positioning for viewers. Adding reference lines at the average or median values of both the X and Y axis measures divides the chart into four quadrants that encode relative performance on both dimensions simultaneously. Bubbles in the upper right quadrant represent entities that perform above average on both measures, while bubbles in the lower left represent below-average performance on both, creating an immediately intuitive performance classification framework.

Reference lines can also mark specific business-defined thresholds such as break-even margins, revenue targets, or regulatory compliance boundaries that carry specific meaning for the analytical context of the report. Labeling reference lines with their business significance, such as “Target Margin” or “Revenue Threshold,” gives viewers immediate interpretive context for the chart’s quadrant structure without requiring a separate legend or explanatory text box. The combination of well-positioned reference lines with the three-dimensional data encoding of the bubble chart produces a visualization that communicates complex multi-dimensional performance assessment in a format that even non-technical business stakeholders can interpret confidently.

Animation and Playback

One of the most distinctive capabilities of the Akvelon Bubble Chart is its support for animated playback that shows how bubble positions and sizes change over time, transforming a static comparative snapshot into a dynamic visualization of historical trends and trajectory. The Play Axis field well accepts a time dimension such as year, quarter, or month, and when configured, adds a playback control bar at the bottom of the visual that animates the chart through each time period sequentially. This animation capability draws direct inspiration from the famous animated bubble charts used by Hans Rosling to visualize global development data, which demonstrated how powerfully animation can communicate temporal change in multi-dimensional data.

Configuring the animation effectively requires ensuring that the time dimension values are correctly sorted and that the animation speed is set appropriately for the number of time periods being displayed. Too many time periods played at high speed produce animations that are too rapid for viewers to follow individual bubble trajectories meaningfully. Adding data labels to bubbles during animation helps viewers track specific entities through time without losing them in the movement of surrounding bubbles. The animation feature is particularly impactful in presentation contexts where a report author narrates the data story accompanying the animation, combining visual movement with verbal explanation to create a memorable and persuasive analytical narrative.

Performance Optimization Tips

Performance optimization is an important consideration when deploying the Akvelon Bubble Chart in production Power BI reports, particularly when the visual is configured to display large numbers of data points or is used within reports that contain many other visuals and complex DAX calculations. Limiting the number of data points displayed in the bubble chart to a manageable count through appropriate filtering, top N limiting, or aggregation improves both rendering performance and analytical clarity, since charts displaying hundreds of bubbles typically provide less actionable insight than those displaying a focused set of the most analytically relevant entities.

Using import mode datasets rather than DirectQuery connections improves the rendering speed of the Akvelon Bubble Chart significantly, as import mode allows Power BI to serve the visual’s data from in-memory storage rather than executing live queries against a source system each time a filter changes. Reducing the complexity of the DAX measures feeding the visual’s field wells, avoiding highly complex calculated columns in favor of optimized measures, and ensuring that the underlying data model is properly structured with appropriate relationships and cardinality settings all contribute to a responsive visual experience that maintains stakeholder engagement during interactive report consumption.

Comparison With Native Scatter

Comparing the Akvelon Bubble Chart against Power BI’s native scatter chart visual helps clarify when the custom visual provides sufficient additional value to justify the overhead of installing and maintaining a third-party component within a report. The native scatter chart supports bubble size encoding through its Size field well, providing similar three-dimensional data encoding capability to the Akvelon visual. For straightforward bubble chart requirements where standard formatting options and basic interactivity are sufficient, the native scatter chart may adequately serve the analytical purpose without introducing a custom visual dependency.

The Akvelon Bubble Chart provides meaningful advantages over the native scatter chart in specific scenarios that justify its use. The animation and play axis capability for temporal data visualization has no equivalent in the native scatter chart and represents the most compelling reason to choose the Akvelon visual for time-series bubble analysis. The quadrant reference line configuration, more extensive bubble formatting options, and the visual’s specific optimization for the comparative entity analysis use case also provide advantages in scenarios where these specific capabilities are analytically important. Choosing between the two options based on specific report requirements rather than defaulting to either option universally produces the most appropriate visual selection for each analytical context.

Real World Business Scenarios

Several real-world business scenarios illustrate the practical analytical value that the Akvelon Bubble Chart delivers when applied to genuine organizational decision-making contexts. Portfolio analysis is a classic application where each bubble represents an investment, product line, or business unit, with X axis encoding market growth rate, Y axis encoding current market share, and bubble size encoding revenue contribution. This configuration produces a visualization directly analogous to the Boston Consulting Group growth-share matrix, one of the most enduring strategic planning frameworks in business management, implemented dynamically with actual organizational data.

Sales team performance analysis represents another high-value application where each bubble represents a sales representative, with X axis showing total revenue, Y axis showing average deal size, and bubble size encoding number of active accounts. Reference lines at team average values for both axes immediately identify high-performers in the upper right quadrant and representatives who may need coaching support in the lower left. Supply chain risk assessment, customer lifetime value segmentation, and product quality versus cost analysis are additional scenarios where the bubble chart’s three-dimensional comparative encoding provides analytical clarity that simpler chart types cannot deliver within the same compact visual footprint available on a typical report page.

Conclusion

The Akvelon Bubble Chart custom visual represents a genuinely valuable addition to the Power BI report author’s visualization toolkit when applied to the analytical scenarios it was designed to serve. Its ability to encode three quantitative dimensions simultaneously within a single visual, combined with animation capability for temporal analysis and extensive formatting options for professional report presentation, makes it one of the more capable and versatile custom visuals available in the Power BI ecosystem from a certified third-party publisher.

Realizing the full analytical potential of this visual requires more than simply installing it and mapping available fields to its field wells. Thoughtful decisions about which variables to encode on each axis and in bubble size, deliberate configuration of reference lines that create meaningful analytical quadrants, careful attention to bubble size scaling accuracy, and strategic use of color encoding to add a fourth analytical dimension all contribute to the difference between a bubble chart that generates genuine insight and one that produces visual complexity without proportional analytical clarity.

The animation capability deserves particular emphasis as a differentiating feature that opens analytical storytelling possibilities unavailable with static visualizations. The ability to show how competitive positions, performance distributions, and portfolio compositions evolve over time through animated playback creates a compelling narrative format that resonates with business audiences in ways that static comparative charts cannot replicate. Report authors who invest in learning to use the play axis feature effectively, and who develop the narrative skills to guide audiences through animated data stories, gain access to a uniquely persuasive analytical communication format.

Integration of the Akvelon Bubble Chart within broader Power BI report designs benefits from treating the visual as one component within a coordinated analytical narrative rather than as a standalone display. Connecting the bubble chart’s cross-filtering behavior to supporting detail visuals, designing tooltip pages that provide contextual depth for individual data points, and positioning the visual within a report page layout that provides interpretive context through titles, annotations, and complementary charts all amplify its communicative impact beyond what the visual alone can achieve in isolation.

As Power BI’s custom visuals ecosystem continues to mature and organizational data literacy continues to grow, the demand for visualizations that communicate complex multi-dimensional relationships clearly and accessibly will only increase. The Akvelon Bubble Chart addresses this demand with a well-engineered, certified, and regularly maintained visual that handles the three-dimensional comparative analysis use case more effectively than native Power BI alternatives in the specific scenarios where its distinctive capabilities are most relevant. For Power BI practitioners building reports that require sophisticated comparative entity analysis, temporal trend visualization, or executive-facing portfolio assessment displays, the Akvelon Bubble Chart merits serious consideration as the visualization component best suited to delivering the analytical clarity and narrative impact these high-stakes reporting contexts demand.