(2018-Aug-30) While preparing for a recent Power BI Toronto meetup session, I found a very valuable whitepaper on Maps in Power BI written by David Eldersveld from the BlueGranite consulting company, and I had used some of the ideas and examples from that document in my presentation.
There is one idea that I couldn't agree more which could be traced and found in many of my Power BI report developments (I admit) and reports developed by others. We've integrated external data source systems, created key metrics in our data model, identified that some of the data elements could be categorized as geolocations in our datasets, and... then we want to start using maps visualizations right away, but do I really need them?
If my dataset contains a customer location info or list of countries where all the tweet messages came from based on a recent marketing campaign then I'm tempted to visualize them. Let's take an example of the following report with the Canadian population by Province. What would be the best way to analyze the population itself, a table, a map, a bar or a pie chart or combination of all of them?
I could easily sort the table by the Population column or look at another non-map visualization (Donut chart, for example, developed by ZoomCharts company) to realize that Quebec is the second largest province by its population.
or I could just select the least populated provinces and territories to find out that their ratio vs. other populated area is less than 1%.
So I wouldn't suggest using Map visualization in Power BI just because my data can allow this to happen. Use other more effective tools or visual components to present your data; combine them with maps, and most of all create a story with your visualizations that will help your audience to understand it better.
It only takes to learn maps visualizations to understand that sometimes something else could be used instead 🙂
There is one idea that I couldn't agree more which could be traced and found in many of my Power BI report developments (I admit) and reports developed by others. We've integrated external data source systems, created key metrics in our data model, identified that some of the data elements could be categorized as geolocations in our datasets, and... then we want to start using maps visualizations right away, but do I really need them?
If my dataset contains a customer location info or list of countries where all the tweet messages came from based on a recent marketing campaign then I'm tempted to visualize them. Let's take an example of the following report with the Canadian population by Province. What would be the best way to analyze the population itself, a table, a map, a bar or a pie chart or combination of all of them?
I could easily sort the table by the Population column or look at another non-map visualization (Donut chart, for example, developed by ZoomCharts company) to realize that Quebec is the second largest province by its population.
or I could just select the least populated provinces and territories to find out that their ratio vs. other populated area is less than 1%.
So I wouldn't suggest using Map visualization in Power BI just because my data can allow this to happen. Use other more effective tools or visual components to present your data; combine them with maps, and most of all create a story with your visualizations that will help your audience to understand it better.
It only takes to learn maps visualizations to understand that sometimes something else could be used instead 🙂
