Alice Drummond has two articles on improving the map experience in Power BI. First up is creating drill-down maps:
But why would we want to drill down on a map?
See the big picture: Using drill down, we can visualise the dataset at the ‘big picture’ scale, and then explore finer details for areas of interest (just think of the classic spatial hierarchy of Country à State à City à Suburb)
Save on real estate: We can also display multiple datasets at different levels in the same map – which goes a long way to conserving your precious report page real estate by reducing the number of visuals in your report!
Performance: Following on from above, less visuals almost always equates to better report performance! And this is especially true when using MapBox, which is at the slower end of the Power BI performance scale at the best of times – so using drill down to reduce the number of maps combined with filtering your datasets goes a long way to speeding up your reports!
The second post is all about styling choropleth maps:
If you’ve played around with MapBox in Power BI – you’ll know that it has loads of great features to create really rich and beautiful maps, including some great ‘out of the box’ map styles (i.e. base maps). However, you might not be aware that it also gives you the ability to design custom styles with your own spatial layers. I discovered this feature on a recent project where my client wanted to include Victoria’s Catchment Management Authority (or CMA) boundaries on their base-map to provide greater context to help interpret their data. Up until this point, the only option I knew of was to purchase an expensive ArcGIS Online licence to create custom map styles. So, you can imagine just how excited I was when I discovered that I could also do this in MapBox – for FREE!!!
Click through for the posts and videos.