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mjfulke's avatar
mjfulke
Microsoft Employee
9 years ago

Create Your Own Custom Map for Power BI

Hi, I’m sharing back with community here (I encourage you to do the same as you come across your own useful Power BI tips and recipes)   In this post, I will share how to create a custom map file t...
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mjfulke's avatar
mjfulke
Microsoft Employee
9 years ago

My suggestion is to use mapshaper.org and use the "Simplify" feature.  You will find that by reducing the complexity of your shapes up to as much as 50-60% you can visually get about the same map.  For example, I have a map of all the counties in the U.S. which is approximately 3000 shapes.  The total file size is 1.25 MB.    It's not as much a Power BI problem but a PC/device issue trying to render lots of detailed Polygons.  Use mapshaper to reduce the detail of your shapes and it should render faster.

hdunn's avatar
hdunn
Frequent Visitor
9 years ago

Hi,

FYI. After a few simplification trials, I found a data below 1MB doesn't slow down the report. 4MB data is still too big with my quite powerful PC.

 

My next issue is the location is not recognised. Even though I set automatic Zoom/Selection Zoom on. It doesn't behave the same as the standard map, such as Australian State map.

 

Is there requirement the map data must meet?

 

Thanks

 

Helen

  • mjfulke's avatar
    mjfulke
    Microsoft Employee
    9 years ago

    hdunn your "Name" property in the Google Maps needs to have values that match your data values.   Then it should work and you can set auto-zoom etc. and it will just work.

    • hdunn's avatar
      hdunn
      Frequent Visitor
      9 years ago

      Yes. It have the same number of rows and the name value is the same as I can perform database join using the source dataset. Do I need a column name as "NAME"?