Shape maps

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.

In order to demonstrate how this feature works I took over the data on US states from the Wikipedia and processed them so that only the name of the state, capital city and population figures remain. By clicking the Shape Map icon we add visual into the report, then the country name column should be dragged into the Locations field and the population information in the Size field. After you have performed this action you will still not see the data within a chart. To make this possible you need to go to the formatting options, open Shape, and then select the country for which the chart is generated. In the menu you will see all countries for which there are available maps, in this case we will select USA States. There is another menu called Projection where we can select the way the map is displayed.