Introduction
This blog explains how you can create a map visualization based report in Power BI desktop. Map visualization is one of the cool features that Power BI provides for doing analysis based on geographical locations. Its pretty useful tool when you want to show any data broken up by geographical locations.
Illustration
To illustrate this, we can consider the below scenario
Consider the case of a retail chain having stores across multiple locations. The consolidated sales figures has been captured as per the below
Map Visualization
Once the data is ready we can add the map visualization to the Power BI page from the visualizations options
Once you add the visualization you will get below control on the page
Select the control and drag State field to Location and Sales field to Values and you will get the below
You will see that the Bing map control automatically plots the data points in the map based on the location based field (State in this case)
You can see the data by hovering over the respective points in the map as shown below
If you analyze this you can see that each point now turns into a pie chart kind of format showing the contribution part of each of district within the state, Hover over a part and it will show district and state information corresponding the the part along with the value for the measure Sales. This is a very helpful visualization for quick reference without even having a need to drilldown to analyze the next lower level details in a hierarchy (geography in this case).
Filled Map Visualization
Conclusion
As you see from above example map visualization is a very good option which you can use to do a quick reference analysis of data based on geographical data. Another good thing about this is that this is available as a standard option within Power BI desktop tool is now free to download. Only if you need to deploy this to a server you would need to take a license.
Hope you enjoyed this article on map visualization in Power BI. So what are you waiting for? Download a free copy of Power BI desktop and starting trying out!