Working with and formatting Azure maps

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A deep-dive into creating and using Azure Map visuals in Power BI Part three of a four-part series of blogs
The Azure map visual has been an official part of Power BI now for nearly a year, and the initial teething problems have now been ironed out. This blog shows how to use the Azure maps visual, and explains why you don't now need to use any of the other map visuals in Power BI. Why you should use the Azure maps for your maps - and how to do so Creating Azure Maps in Power BI Working with and formatting Azure maps (this blog) Creating heat, clusters 3D column, traffic and reference layers

A deep-dive into creating and using Azure Map visuals in Power BI

Part three of a four-part series of blogs

The Azure map visual has been an official part of Power BI now for nearly a year, and the initial teething problems have now been ironed out. This blog shows how to use the Azure maps visual, and explains why you don't now need to use any of the other map visuals in Power BI.

Why you should use the Azure maps for your maps - and how to do so
Creating Azure Maps in Power BI
Working with and formatting Azure maps (this blog)
Creating heat, clusters 3D column, traffic and reference layers

Posted by Andy Brown on 04 March 2024

In this blog

Maps are just like any other visual
Maps support visual interactions
Selecting multiple points
Selecting within driving time/distance
Zoom Settings
Conditional formatting
Changing the Map Background
Viewing controls

This blog page shows the many ways in which you can format Azure map visuals, and also some general tricks for working with them.

Maps are just like any other visual

The first thing to remember is that a map is just another visual, so you can apply all of the standard formatting techniques:

A basic map, with no formatting applied.

For example, by adding a title, subtitle, dividing line, border, background colour and shadow effect you could change the above map to look like this:

Exactly the same map!

Maps support visual interactions

It's probably obvious, but when you select a data point in a map other visuals on the same page will (unless you've specified otherwise) reflect this change:

Selecting the East Anglia bubble filters the table to show just towns in East Anglia.

Selecting multiple points

If you want you can give users of your report the opportunity to select multiple points in one go:

You'll need to enable the Selection control first.

You can then click on the selection tool:

Clicking on the selection tool gives you 4 different ways to select points: Circle, Rectangle, Polygon or Range.

Here's what the first 3 might let you do:

Tool	Example	What it would select
Circle		Two points (the one on the right is more than 50% included in the circle).
Rectangle		Four points (notice that the rectangle isn’t a true rectangle because of the curvature of the earth!).
Polygon		Two points (double-click to finish the polygon), but see the hint below.

The polygon tool only seems to correctly select points when you view a report in Power BI Service (for desktop reports when you double-click to finish a polygon nothing happens).

Selecting within driving time/distance

Instead of these 3 tools, you could choose Range to see how far you'd get if the 60-minute warning sounded:

The first thing to do is say where the centre of your Universe should be.

You can then specify your range (either in time or distance):

Here we'll show everything within a one hour drive of the Wise Owl head office.

Power BI will then select all data points lying within this area:

I'm not convinced you could make it this far in one hour, given the local traffic, but it's an impressive feature.

Zoom Settings

One of the most annoying things about Azure maps is that they continually zoom back out again, but it's easy enough to change this:

The example below automatically zooms in to the Trafford Centre near Manchester, with zoom setting 11 (see below for more on what this means).

Here are the settings to change:

Crucially, this turns the irritating Auto zoom setting off, and also takes us to a zoom leve of 11, looking at an angle of 30 degrees and centred on the Trafford Centre's coordinates.

Fun fact: the zoom settings go from 0 to 24. Power BI divides the world into (2 to the power of n) tiles, where n is the zoom setting (so for 0 you just get one tile showing the entire world, for 1 you get 2 squared = 4 tiles, for 2 you get 2 cubed = 8 tiles, etc).

Conditional formatting

You can conditionally format map points, in the same way as for any other visual:

Choose to show the colours of the bubble layer of your map (assuming you have a default map) and click on the fx icon.

Set (for example) a gradient effect based on the volume of goods sold:

The more sales there are in a town, the darker its bubble will be.

This will give something like this:

Leeds and Manchester dominate. Shame there's no decent rail service between them ...

Changing the Map Background

You can choose from a number of different backgrounds:

Three sample backgrounds.

Here's how you change the map background:

Most of the maps in this blog use the Grayscale (Light) background.

Viewing controls

You can choose which symbols you want to display on a map:

How to choose which controls to display.

Here are the possibilities:

See below for what these symbols mean.

From top top bottom here's what the symbols mean:

Symbol	What it means
	Allows you to zoom in and out.
	Changes the angle of the pitch of view for the map.
	Rotates the map.
	Enables point selection (as shown previously in this blog).

What this all shows is that Microsoft have taken the best bits from ArcGIS maps and MapBox visuals and combined them - it all works very well!

Parts of this blog
Why you should use the Azure maps for your maps - and how to do so Creating Azure Maps in Power BI Working with and formatting Azure maps (this blog) Creating heat, clusters 3D column, traffic and reference layers

Some other pages relevant to the above blogs include:

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