The ArcGIS Map visual for Power BI enables report authors to develop map visualizations far beyond the capabilities of the bubble and filled map visuals described in Chapter 5, Creating and Formatting Power BI Reports. Created by Esri, a market leader in Geographic Information Systems (GIS), the ArcGIS Map supports all standard map types (for example, bubble and heatmap), but also provides many additional features including a clustering map theme for grouping individual geographic points and the ability to filter a map by the points within a geographical area. The ArcGIS Map also enables deep control over the logic of the size and color formatting, such as the number of distinct sizes (classes) to display and the algorithm used to associate locations to these classes. Additionally, reference layers and cards of demographic and economic information can be embedded into visuals to provide greater context.

The ArcGIS Map visual is included in the standard visualizations pane and enabled by default in Power BI Desktop. However, as noted in Chapter 10, Deploying the Power BI Report Server, the ArcGIS Map visual is not currently supported for the Power BI Report Server and thus is not available in the Power Desktop application optimized for the Power BI Report Server. Additionally, an option is available in the Tenant settings page of the Power BI admin portal to enable or disable the use of the ArcGIS Maps visual. Details on utilizing the Power BI admin portal to configure tenant settings and other options are included in Chapter 12, Administering Power BI for an Organization.  

In the following example, customer addresses in the state of Washington have been plotted as diamonds of different sizes and colors based on the Internet Sales measure and the Customer History Segment column, respectively:  

The visual has been zoomed into the Bremerton, Washington area near several large customers and a fictional sales office location denoted by a red pin icon on 11th street near downtown Bremerton. Pin locations are often used in conjunction with the Drive Time feature to plot an area relative to specific locations such as the group of customers who are within a 20-minute drive of an office. 

To configure these options and all other layout and formatting settings, click the ellipsis in the top right corner and select Edit. The following image displays the edit mode of an ArcGIS visual with the Pins menu selected: 

For this visual, the Streets basemap type has been selected and the Map theme is set to Size & Color. The reference layer USA Median Age is used to distinguish areas based on age (via color intensity). Finally, two infographic cards have been selected—population and age by gender—to display these specific metrics as the user selects and hovers over the map.     

The Customer History Segment column, described in Chapter 2, Connecting to Sources and Transforming Data with M, evaluates to one of four values based on the relationship between the Current Date and the Customer First Purchase date column. In this example, first year, second year, and third year customers are assigned the colors purple, green, and blue, respectively. Legacy customers have been formatted as orange. The size and color formatting can be customized via the Symbol Style menu, and these options alone make it relatively easy for users to gain insights from the visual such as identifying the location of first year customers. 

To provide greater analytical flexibility and to support presentations, the Date column from the Date dimension table has been applied to the Time input field, thus creating the timeline scrollbar. Similar to the play axis of the scatter chart described later in this chapter, the timeline for the ArcGIS Map supports both animation via the play and pause buttons and slider controls to define a specific time frame. 

The timeline and two measures are further supplemented with two date intelligence measures in the Tooltips field input. In the following example, the user has hovered over the address location of a First Year Customer (a purple diamond) and the two date intelligence measures (year-to-date and prior year-to-date), as well as the Date column from the timeline, which leads to them being exposed: 

Selections of ArcGIS Map locations also impact other visuals on the report page. For example, the selection of one address location on the map could cause a bar chart visual to filter or highlight the specific product subcategories associated with that location. Additionally, rather than selecting one location at a time, areas of locations can be selected via the Select Multiple Locations option and the areas of a reference layer can also be used to select locations. The multi-select options under the cursor icon and the cross-filtering of other related Power BI visuals provide powerful self-service geospatial analysis capabilities.