Maps Power BI allows us to create a map visual as long as we have any column of data which contains geographical information such as country name, State, postcode, Zip code, even longitude or latitude.

And from that column or field it can then generate a map using bing technology. It will plot a dot or a bubble for each location in your column and the size of the dot can be determined by a numerical field such as sales.

It's possible to map just a certain region. So we don't have to have a map of the entire world. If our data only uses states in America, then our map will automatically focus on that. We can also manually zoom in and out of the map.

We can also have filled maps, it's a little bit like a heat map where the shading intensifies as the value increases.

Let's do a workout and see how to create maps in Power BI.

So I'm going to take the L4 Revenue workbook. First of all, I'm going to select the country field. The country field has a list of different country names in it and we can see right away Power BI has detected that and used the bing technology to plot those country names on a world map.

Now if I add in a numerical field such as revenue, we'll see the size of the dots change. The total revenue now I determines the size of that dot or bubble and I hover over here, for example, we can see United States and the total revenue amount.

I can also use my mouse to zoom in or zoom out of a particular area at any time.

Let's try a second map, so if I just click on to another page here and I'm going to use the other table that I brought through the L4 US sales and I select the State field. So right away again, we get another map plotted for us and we can see how it zooms in and focuses on the one region here because the only data I have in this column contains US names.

If I bring in my numerical field that will change the size of the dots there and we have a nice map there plotting the total value for each state.

I'm going to do one more thing with this map, I'm just going to change it to a slightly different visual. It's defaulted to the map visual, but we also have beside it here in the visualization spin a filled map. So if I just change it to a filled map, this is all about the shading. Now. I have one more change to make here. So I'm just going to go to my formatting section.

And if I click in here, I can go down to the fill colors and the fill colors I am happy with the blue, though I can change it if I wished anything else it just needs amanding slightly. I'm clicking on this little icon here to apply or change the rule.

The rule needs to be changed slightly here. So if I go into L4 US Sales, I want to set the rule based on the total value so my numerical field and it's the sum of that numerical field. So I'm happy with that. Click on OK and we get now a sheared map. So the darker the color we know that is a higher revenue.