How to Create a Custom Map in Power BI

A simple bar chart can show you sales figures, but a map can show you where those sales are happening, revealing regional trends a table could never capture. With Power BI, you can move beyond standard state or country maps and design completely custom visual experiences, like an interactive floor plan of your retail store or a color-coded map of your unique sales territories. This guide will walk you through creating both standard and highly customized maps in Power BI, step by step.

Why Use Maps in Your Power BI Reports?

Before jumping into the "how," let's quickly touch on the "why." Geographic data is incredibly powerful. Visualizing data on a map helps you:

• Spot Spatial Patterns: Instantly see clusters, gaps, and outliers. Are your highest-value customers all located in one city? Is a marketing campaign underperforming in a specific region?
• Make Data More Relatable: People inherently understand geography. Placing data on a map provides immediate context that a spreadsheet cannot. Seeing a red dot over your city is much more impactful than reading its name in a list.
• Improve Decision-Making: By understanding the where, you can make better choices about resource allocation, logistics, marketing spend, and market expansion.

Getting Started: The Two Standard Power BI Map Visuals

Power BI offers two excellent built-in options for basic geo-mapping: the Map and the Filled Map. The main difference is simple: the Map uses bubbles or points to represent data points, while the Filled Map colors in the boundaries of a region (like a state or country).

Required Data for Maps

To use either map visual, your dataset needs some form of location data. Power BI is smart enough to recognize several types:

• Geographic Names: City, Country, State, Province, County, etc.
• Postal Codes: Zip codes or other regional codes.
• Latitude and Longitude: For precise point-mapping.

Pro Tip: The cleaner your data, the better your map will be. Ensure consistent spelling and formatting for location names (e.g., "USA" vs. "United States") to avoid mapping errors.

How to Create a Basic Filled Map

Let's visualize sales revenue by state. Here’s a quick step-by-step example:

1. Add the Visual: In the Visualizations pane, click the Filled Map icon (it looks like a globe with shaded regions).
2. Assign Location Data: From your Data pane, drag your state field (e.g., "State") into the Location bucket of the visual. Power BI will generate a map with your states outlined.
3. Add the Measure: Drag your numerical data field (e.g., "Sales Revenue") into the Color saturation bucket (for Filled Maps) or the Bubble size bucket (for standard Maps).

Just like that, you have an interactive map where states with higher sales are more intensely colored. This is great for broad overviews, but what if your business doesn't operate neatly within standard state or country lines?

Advanced Mapping: Creating a Custom Shape Map

A Shape Map visual allows you to use your own custom geographic boundaries, moving beyond defaults like countries or states. For example, you could map custom sales territories that group several counties together or visualize election results by congressional district.

Step 1: Enable the Shape Map Visual

The Shape Map is often a "preview feature." To make sure it's active:

1. Go to File > Options and settings > Options.
2. Navigate to the Preview features tab.
3. Check the box next to Shape map visual and click OK.
4. Restart Power BI.

Step 2: Get Your Custom Map File

This is the essential part. Shape Maps require a specific file format called TopoJSON. Don't let the name intimidate you. A TopoJSON file is just a text file that defines the coordinates of your custom shapes.

You can find pre-made TopoJSON files for various geographies online (a quick search for "US counties topojson" yields many results). You can also create your own by converting other GIS file types (like .shp) using a free online tool like Mapshaper.

The critical element is that your TopoJSON file must contain keys that match the location data in your dataset. For example, if your file maps US states, it likely has a field inside named "stusps" containing the two-letter state abbreviation. Your data table should also have a column with these abbreviations to link them together.

Step 3: Build Your Custom Shape Map Report

1. Add the Visual: Add the Shape map visual to your Power BI report canvas.
2. Connect Your Data: Drag the location field from your dataset (e.g., a column with your custom sales region names) to the Location bucket. Then, drag your measure (e.g., "Units Sold") to the Color saturation bucket. At this point, the map will be blank or showing a default.
3. Load the Custom Map: With the visual selected, go to the Format your visual tab (the paintbrush icon).

Power BI will now render your custom shapes and color them based on your data, matching the location names from your dataset to the corresponding shape keys in the TopoJSON file.

Ultimate Customization: Using an Image as a Map

What if your "map" isn't geographic at all? Maybe you want to visualize foot traffic across a retail store's floor plan, show sensor data from a piece of machinery, or track RSVPs on a stadium seating chart. For this, you need a custom visual from AppSource called the Synoptic Panel.

The Synoptic Panel lets you use any image as your map and define clickable, data-driven areas on top of it.

Step 1: Get the Synoptic Panel Visual

1. In the Visualizations pane, click the three dots (…) and select Get more visuals.
2. Search for "Synoptic Panel" and click Add. The visual will now appear in your visualizations pane.

Step 2: Create Your Map Areas with Synoptic Designer

You can't just drop an image in and expect it to work. You first need to tell the visual which parts of the image correspond to which data points. This is done with a free web tool called the Synoptic Designer (synoptic.design).

1. Upload Your Image: Go to the website and drag your image (like a .jpg or .png of a floor plan) onto the canvas.
2. Trace Your Areas: Use the tools on the left to draw shapes over the sections you want to track. For instance, you could draw a polygon around the "Electronics" section of your store floor plan, another around "Apparel," and so on.
3. Name Each Area: This is the most important step. Every time you draw a shape, give it a name in the box on the right. This name must exactly match the value in your dataset. If your data table has a row where the "Department" column says "Electronics," your traced shape must also be named "Electronics."
4. Export Your Map: Once you've traced and named all your areas, click Export to Power BI. This will download an .svg file. This file contains both your image and the area data you defined.

Step 3: Build the Report in Power BI

1. Add the Visual: Add your new Synoptic Panel visual to the report canvas.
2. Connect Data Fields:
3. Load your Custom SVG Map: With the visual selected, select the Format your visual tab.

Your image will appear, with the areas you traced now color-coded based on the measure you provided. You can now tweak the colors, add data labels, and configure states (e.g., make any department with foot traffic under 100 show up red) in the formatting pane to create a stunning, fully interactive visual display.

Final Thoughts

From simple location plotting to fully interactive and custom diagrams, Power BI provides an impressive range of mapping capabilities. By mastering both the built-in map visuals and powerful custom visual solutions like the Synoptic Panel, you can transform flat data into compelling geographic and spatial stories that highlight key insights and drive smarter business decisions.

Wrestling with TopoJSON files, complex BI tools, and messy datasets can sometimes distract from the real goal: getting clear answers. We built Graphed to remove that friction completely. Instead of building reports step-by-step, you can simply connect all your sales and marketing data a single time, then ask for what you need in plain English. Graphed automatically generates real-time dashboards and reports, so you can spend less time configuring visuals and more time acting on the insights they provide.