I hope you were able to attend my free webinar on Creating Power Map Reporting Solutions on April 17 2014.  If you weren’t you can now watch the recording here.

Following each webinar I like to post a quick Q&A session for everything I was not able to answer in the allotted time.

Q: Am I correct in that you need the Pro Plus version of Office 365 and not the Home or University version?

Yes, that’s correct most of the Power BI features in Excel (Power Pivot, Power View, etc..) require the Office Pro Plus edition.

Q: I thought I could do Power Map without Office 365?

Prior to Power Map’s official release it was available to anyone running Excel 2013 (O365 or traditional) but when Power Map was officially release it was released as an Office 365 only feature.  You can however still download the preview and try it on non-O365 versions.

Q: Is there any way to use custom geographic data using shape file? For ex: school boundaries

I get this question a lot.  If your school boundaries fit within traditional geo-political boundaries (zip, county, etc…) you can make this work now but you cannot upload your own shapes yet.  To make this work now you would just categories each of you boundaries in something Power Map can understand.