Forum Discussion
Impactful IndividualMicrosoft Azure's map can identify incorrect postal codes - where data?
Azure Maps geocoding is a black-box service: Power BI sends your location fields to the geocoder and gets back coordinates. Microsoft/Azure doesn’t publish the full country+postal reference dataset used for geocoding, and Power BI doesn’t expose it.
What you’re seeing is normal geocoder behavior: if the postal code is invalid for the supplied country (or the country hint isn’t applied strongly enough), it may fallback and resolve the postal code somewhere else (often the US if it’s a valid US ZIP).
Practical ways to reduce wrong matches:
Use the correct field category: set Country to Country/Region and Postal to Postal code.
Prefer 2-letter ISO country codes (AT) over 3-letter (AUT) if possible; some geocoders handle them more reliably.
Add more context (City/State/Region) so the geocoder has less ambiguity.
Best: bring your own lat/long (or a reference table that maps valid postal+country to lat/long) and plot by coordinates. That bypasses geocoding entirely.
Super UserHi DouweMeer ,
as cengizhanarslan already mentioned, Azure Maps geocoding is a black-box service.
But it's often worth being a little creative when working with Azure Maps.
You can build a new column like this one:
The result:
The invalid postal code leads to a dot in the middle of austria. It's up to you to adapt color or tooltip according to your needs.
Hope that helps.
DouweMeerTried it today. Shows only USA country code data in Puerto Rico. As soon as I filter to AUT as country, the map becomes empty.
Sample of concatenated values:
No dot
Also tried to swap the country postal code and use a different separator, same behavior. Only Puerto Rico showing with US data and empty map on anything else.
- Hans-Georg_Puls
Hi DouweMeer ,
it looks like you assigned the new concatenated column as a second location and kept your original location as the first assigned location. That leads to a hierarchy. Do you need a hierarchy? It doesn't surprise me that the results are still confusing.
To reproduce my solution you should assign only the new concatenated column as location. That should work.
- DouweMeer
Without the country in hierarchy I get the exact same behavior.
Filter on AUT as country or whether that location starts with AUT, you get nothing
And the data definitely contains locations associated with that filter context as it can be seen in a table visual.
Edit -> Didn't know USA + 00638 is actually puerto rico, so that seems fine. But filtering on Austria gets me nothing. Using another visual to cross filter doesn't get me anything either.