Forum Discussion
PowerBI & Spatial Data Questions
Can I ask some new questions?
1. I searched "Maps" in Powerbi and Azure but nothing came up in the tenants to turn on the maps features.
2. PowerBI used to be a part of Office 365. Has it been separated? I installed the desktop version on my local machine but I guess that cannot access the map services.
3. Why would I used/sub this service when I could just sub a service that had it all in one package? ESRI now has a free account and it works in Excel. Honestly, this was the only reason I used powerbi. If I could do everything in Excel I would. PBI is not supported on any other platforms except for Microsoft. What is the rationale for some of these decisions?
Hi residentx ,
Thank you for reaching out to the Microsoft fabric community forum.The ZIP code issue is happening because Power BI is automatically treating the ZIP code column as a numeric field and applying aggregation like Count/Sum. Changing the column type to Text and setting Don’t summarize is the correct approach.
Regarding the map issue, from the error message in your screenshot, it looks like the Map and Filled Map visuals are disabled in the tenant settings. This setting can only be enabled by the Power BI/Microsoft 365 admin, so normal users will not see this option in personal settings or search.
Power BI Desktop can still use map visuals, but those visuals depend on Microsoft online map services. If the tenant setting is turned off, the maps will not work even in Desktop.
For your reference, the admin can check this setting here:
Power BI Service → Admin Portal → Tenant Settings → Map and Filled Map visualsAlso, thank you for sharing your feedback regarding the current Power BI experience and comparison with Excel/ESRI. We completely understand your concern.
Please find the attached file for your reference:
Manage Azure Maps Power BI visual within your organization - Microsoft Azure Maps | Microsoft LearnHope the above provided information help you resolve the issue, if you have any further concerns or queries, please feel free to reach out to us.
Regards,
Community Support Team.v-hjannapu I forgot to add this detail...I'm the tenant administrator, lol.
I'll do the following steps:
1. I'll install the powerbi client that is connected to my tenant not the desktop. My original experiences with powerbi were with the desktop and it did everything I needed so I had no need to use the connected version but Microsoft changes things and I'll walk down this road for now.
2. I have a scenario I should mention. I have 2 office 365 tenants. One were I put my data (Personal Account). The other is a corporate tenant for my business (E3). I had problems working with outside users having to login to see links and files I sent them so I moved my data out of my 365 Corporate tenant to make it easier to work with 3rd parties.
When I do work now, I do the work local and complete 90% and then I upload into the cloud and do the maintenance. Once in the cloud, then I "Favorite" in Office Applications for greater productivity (fast local large disks, GPUs, and cores machines).
Hi residentx,
Thanks for sharing the additional background. Your workflow and tenant separation approach makes sense, especially for external collaboration scenarios.
Doing most of the development locally first and later publishing to the Service is still a common approach followed by many users, particularly when working with larger datasets and higher-performance local systems.
The multi-tenant setup you described could also explain some of the behavior differences you are seeing between Desktop and Service experiences, especially for cloud-connected features.
Please share your findings after testing further with the tenant-connected environment. That information will help narrow down whether the issue is related to the tenant context or the current Power BI configuration.
Regards,
Community Support Team.
