Shape Maps are predefined maps that are recently deployed as business intelligence visuals for Power BI Desktop, and contain predefined maps of organizational units (republics, regions, ares) within the state. This is a new functionality that is supported only for some countries, but it’s not bad idea to mention it as I believe that one day it will be available for more countries including Serbia.
Vector maps were always better than raster for better quality and more precise location display. Power BI since recently supports ArcGIS maps, based on Esri’s geographic information system, which in addition to common functionality of maps offers the ability to use some profound options and display statistics. The text that follows will be about the basic features of this visual.
When creating report visuals, their look is modified by dragging the dimensions and measures into different fields within the Visuals panel. One of the visuals fields is called Tooltip, and by adding values to this field we could see them as an additional clarification of report series after we position the mouse over them. Power BI Desktop now has the ability to add entire charts that behaves as a tooltip.
In one of the previous articles I wrote about how to use the slicers to filter out PowerPivot reports, and since recent update Power BI Desktop has the functionality to automatically configure these settings. Adding a new parameter creates an auxiliary table for filtering the visuals contained in the report. At the same time, a special slider with which we are filtering appears in the report.
In the Home ribbon there are options for adding measures (New Measure) and calculated columns (New Column), and recent novelty is functionality that is used to add „quick measures“ (New Quick Measure). It allows beginners that do not have the experience of writing a DAX expressions to create measures by simply dragging names of the reporting dimensions into the predicted fields, after which application automatically generates formulas.