Power BI Desktop Map and excel 2013

[AdrianOConnor]

Questions on Power BI Desktop.

New Dashboard\Report and I get data from an excel file (Name, Latitude, Longitude, Type and Value).

When I click on the world map, it asks me for Location, Legend, Longitude, Latitude and Values.

As soon as I drag the LocationName field across it somehow pulls in all the other data too, which is fine but straight away I seems to have Points\locations across the world which don’t correspond to the Location data I have uploaded...?

Then as drag across the rest of the fields Legend, Longitude, and Latitude nothing changes, as in the incorrect locations on the map are still visible.

However once I add the Value field of 600 for all sites, it correctly puts all the locations in the right place.

The problem then is that one the map it displays different sized circles for and seems to use the "Longitude" as the value..

Any ideas if this is known bug or am I just doing something wrong?

Thank you

[WillT]

Hi Adrian. We use Bing to determine where to plot points, so we send them the values in the Location field to geocode. That gives us a lat/lon, but it's not always right (if you just send 'Paris', they return Paris, France rather than Paris, Texas for example). You can use lat/lon from your own data to correct this. We do know about the issue where it's only corrected once you've put something in Values - you shouldn't need to specify that - and we're working on a fix. You can try creating a measure with a fixed value and put that into Values, then they should all appear the same size. Thanks!

[fitnesspowerbi]

I have tried using the lat/lon to plot the location of specific points of interest in my data, as you suggested. The lat/lon are set as the data type and category however when I attempt to plot it, the lat/lon is summed and the correct points are not plotted. How do I get around this? I have specific points that should be plotted with the name of the location appearing on the map.

[sjkp]

I have the same issue, and to me it seems like lat-long currently cannot be used reliably, which is a shame I can think of lot of scenarios where you would want to map a location that is not an address. 

[WillT]

Hi folks - sorry for the silence and not responding to the thread. One thing that is worth noting is that you do need a field in the Location area in the Field Well, even when you're using the lat/long values. That's so we know which field to split the data up over. For example, if you have this data:

Office  Lat    Long   Amount

Paris   48.8   2.34   542

Paris   48.8   2.34   241

London  51.5  -0.05   155

Then putting 'Office' into the Location field shows that you want to aggregate the values for each Office. Again, that needs to be unique so make sure to created a calculated column to distinguish between Paris, France and Paris, Texas.

We're working on improvements in this area to make it easier to work with maps, please stay tuned!

[AdrianOConnor]

Hi WillT,

Thank you for coming back to me. How do you use Bing to determine where to send plot points?

I used Bing maps to manually copy all of the lat\long into a spreadsheet.,,

I also tried to change the Value from an excel value to a Measure = 1 but it still seems to show up on the Map using the Longitude as the value number. I would imagine its a mistake possibly.

Can you also tell is the Online version of PowerBI the same as the Desktop version or should I try both?

Thank you