Draw your custom shape maps by yourself!

Hi everyone!

I would like to share with you a tool I created. I think it will be interesting for you if:

1. You want to display your data on a custom shape map
2. You cannot find the map you need in the required json format

I personally was confronted to this issue a few month ago: the company I was working for had a customized way of splitting their country. Of course they had no shapes for these country in any format, they just had a picture of their territories.

This is why I created ByMapSelf (in WPF). With it you can:

• Draw your maps with free hand point by point or in continuous drawing
• Use the borders of the shapes you have already created so that there are no ugly spaces between bricks
• Add polygons to an existing shape if you need to created island, or a duplicated zoomed part in your map
• Add holes to shapes if you need to add a lake, or if your shape looks like a donut
• Load pictures as background to help you draw the shapes (I personally have less drawing skills than my 5 years old son)
• Load backgrounds directly from the integrated web browser, and you your favorite map provider (Bing maps :smileywink:)
• Save your work in a dedicated file format
• Export your shapes as a json file for Power BI custom shape map
• Export your shapes in a sql file, in case you would need them in SSRS

ByMapSelf is free for the community. I enjoyed developing it and will be very proud if it can help analysts around the world.

Please read the article I wrote on the subject. You can download the tool from here. You won't need to create an account or leave an email.

ByMapSelf screenshotPower BI ewample