Power BI – How to Create a Map?

A map only locates the location as a data point, whether it’s a continent, country, state, city, etc. Maps can also be plotted with the help of latitude and longitude. Maps can be useful, to know the current running business over different geographical locations. For example, if geeks for geeks want to analyze the number of watch times on their website in different states, then a map can be a useful tool, for better visualization. In this article, we will learn how to create a map in Power BI.

Creating a Map in Power BI

A map has multiple options while creating, and customizing it. We will take a look at each of the options. For example, we are given a dataset of Employees, and we want to make a map, consisting of location as location(city names), legends as Department, bubble size as Bonus, and tooltips as Employee name and Salary. We will explore each option while creating this map.

The following are the steps:

Step 1: Given the dataset, Employee. The columns we will use for this article are Location, Department, Salary, Bonus, Employee Name, Latitude, and Longitude.

Step 2: Under the Visualizations section, click on the Map.

Step 3: An empty map is created. This map does not contain any fields. Our next task is to add columns to it.

Step 4: Adding Location in the map. Drag and drop Location into the location section. We can see that the cities in the dataset have appeared on the map. We can also observe, all the cities are of the same color i.e. blue.

Step 5: Legends, help sub-categorize the data. It is preferred to use legends, on categorical data. Drag and drop Department, under the Legend section. We can see in the image, that, each department, gets its own color. For example, the IT department got a Blue color, and hence the Salary of Arushi and Gautam is shown on the blue data point.

Step 6: Bubble size refers to the quantity of a column. The larger the numeric value, the greater will be the size of the bubble. Drag and drop Bonus into the Bubble size section. 

Step 7: Our next task, is to add Tooltips to the map. Tooltips provide additional information that we want to see, whenever we hover at a data point. In the below image, we can see that, we have hovered at Noida, and we view the previously added tooltips i.e.Location Noida, and Department IT. These tooltips appeared, as we have added, these measures previously. Now, think what if we want to add Employee Name, and Salary to this list? Drag and drop Employee Name and Salary under Tooltips. Now, again hover over Noida. 

Step 9: We can also add latitude and longitude, instead of location into our map. Latitude and Longitude are the data points, which tell a particular position on the globe. Remove, Location under the Location section, and add Latitude and Longitude into the map. We can observe that an error came, this happened because, by default, PowerBI summarizes the numerical values, and hence we received an error.

Step 10: To remove the error, simply right-click on the longitude. A drop-down appears. Click on the don’t summarize option. Repeat the same for latitude.

Step 11: We can see that a map is successfully created.