Creating Filled Maps in Power BI Desktop

Map visualization is a major topic covered during our power bi training in Sydney and Melbourne. This is because map visuals are one of the best communication tools to convey information related to the distribution of measureable quantities across different locations. Filled maps give us an overview about the Data Distribution across the Geographical Locations. Filled maps are used when we need information about defined regions instead of defined points. Let’s first have a look at the dataset required to build maps. Maps are supported in Power BI for a data set containing spatial features. These features include any information related to the location such as longitude, latitude, zip, City, State, etc.  The data set also contains records for a value measured (for example Units Sold) at the particular locations. It might seem easy to create map visuals just like any other visual in Power BI desktop by dragging and dropping the required fields to the targeted values, but this may land you in trouble. Therefore, Spatial data must be preprocessed to provide accurate mapping. There are a few mistakes that need to be avoided for accurate visualization of spatial data. Before you can start working with the map visualization:

• The data must be transformed.
• The data types must be set.

This blog walks you through four steps to create a filled map in Power BI. Let’s look at the data set we will be using in this blog. The data set used for this exercise contains information on sales figures across 11 states in the United States of America. This is what sample data looks like.