Power BI - Create a Filled Map

A filled map is similar to a map in Power BI. A filled map, allocates a certain area of the location mentioned, while a map only locates the location as a data point, whether it's a continent, country, etc. Filled maps can be useful, to know the exact boundaries of a location, whether it is a country, state, district, etc. In this article, we will learn how to create a filled map in Power BI. 

Creating a Filled Map in Power BI 

A filled 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 filled map, consisting of location as Home State, legends as Department, and tooltips as Employee name and Salary. We will explore each option while creating this Filled map.

The following are the steps:

Step 1: Given the dataset, Employee. The columns we will use for this article is Home State, Department, Tooltips, Latitude, and Longitude. 

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

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

Step 4: Adding Location in the filled map. Drag and drop Home State into the location section. We can see that the states in the dataset have appeared on the map. We can also observe, all the states 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 purple color, and hence the Salary of Arushi and Gautam is shown in purple.

Step 6: Our next task, is to add Tooltips to the filled 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 Haryana, and we view the previously added tooltips i.e. Home State Haryana, 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?

Step 7:  Drag and drop Employee Name and Salary under Tooltips. Now, again hover over Haryana. We can see that Employee Name, Arushi, and Salary 90K. 

Note: The salary displayed is 90K, because it includes the salary of Gautam, whereas only First Name is shown, hence, Arushi's name is  only visible under the tooltips section.  

Step 9: Now, comes the Latitude and Longitude section. For understanding this section, we need to better understand the meaning of latitude and longitude. The latitude and longitude are points, which tell the exact location of a point on the globe, and they do not give any information about a region. As, we know, a filled map shows the area occupied under that location, hence, latitude and longitude won't work in a filled map. Below are the two images shown. The first image shows the data values of the latitude and the longitude in the original data. The second image shows, that there are no changes in the map, even after adding latitude and longitude for each state. We can right-click, on the option latitude or longitude, and can find that there is no option of don't summarize in the filled map, but this option is present in the map.