Press "Enter" to skip to content

Geometry and Geography Functions in Power BI

Chris Webb walks us through some new Power Query functionality:

In the August 2020 release of Power BI Desktop a couple of new Power Query functions were added: Geography.FromWellKnownTextGeography.ToWellKnownTextGeographyPoint.FromGeometry.FromWellKnownTextGeometry.ToWellKnownText and GeometryPoint.From. These functions (which are coming soon to Power Query in Excel too), make it easier to work with geographic and geometric data in the Well Known Text format. You can have all kinds of fun with these functions if you have a visual (like the Icon Map custom visual) that can display Well Known Text data, but I’ll leave that kind of thing for future blog posts. In this post I’ll explain how the basics of how the functions actually work.

So far, it looks like it’s converting strings of latitude and longitude data (in the geography case) into individual elements for plotting, but no distance measures at this time.