What is a Filled Map in Power BI?

A filled map is one of the most effective ways to tell a story about your data across different geographical areas. In Power BI, this visual doesn't just look impressive — it turns rows of state or country data into immediate, actionable insights. This guide will walk you through exactly what a filled map is, when to use one, and how to create and format your own, step by step.

What Exactly is a Filled Map?

A filled map, sometimes known as a choropleth map, represents data by coloring or shading entire geographical regions — like countries, states, counties, or zip codes. The intensity of the color corresponds to a specific data value. For instance, in a sales report, states with higher sales figures would be shaded darker, while those with lower sales would be lighter. This creates an intuitive visual that your brain can process much faster than a table of numbers a page long.

Think of it as instantly highlighting regional patterns. You can look at the map and immediately spot hotspots, such as "our highest sales are concentrated in the Northeast" or "website engagement is lowest in a particular international region."

Filled Map vs. Bubble Map: What's the Difference?

Power BI offers a few different map visuals, and it's helpful to know which one to choose. The primary alternative to a filled map is a bubble map (or a standard point map).

• Filled Map: Colors an entire, predefined area (a state, country, etc.). It’s great for showing data ratios, percentages, or categories that apply uniformly across a region.
• Bubble Map: Places a circle (or bubble) over a specific point location, with the size of the bubble representing a data value. It's ideal for showing the magnitude of a value at a specific city or address, without geographic borders influencing the visual.

If you're comparing sales by state, a filled map is perfect. If you want to show sales volume at specific store locations within those states, a bubble map is the better choice.

When Should You Use a Filled Map?

Filled maps are incredibly useful, but they excel in certain scenarios. Here are a few times when a filled map is the perfect visual for your report:

• Comparing Metrics Across Standard Regions: This is the classic use case. Filled maps are perfect for visualizing sales revenue by state, population density by country, website users by province, or any metric that can be aggregated up to a defined geographical boundary.
• Showing Categorical Data: Maps aren't just for numbers. You can use categorical data to define the colors. For example, you could assign a specific color to each regional sales manager to see a map of their territories at a glance.
• Identifying Geographic Trends and Clusters: Are all your high-value customers clustered in a particular area? Is a marketing campaign performing exceptionally well in certain states? A filled map makes these patterns immediately obvious, helping you spot opportunities or potential issues without having to sift through spreadsheets.

An important note: be mindful that the size of a geographic area can sometimes skew perception. A large state like Montana might visually dominate a smaller, more densely populated state like New Jersey, even if New Jersey has far higher sales. In these cases, it's worth considering if another chart or combining the map with a bar chart might tell a more complete story.

How to Create a Filled Map in Power BI: A Step-by-Step Guide

Creating a filled map is surprisingly straightforward once you have your data organized correctly. Here’s how to do it.

Step 1: Get Your Data Ready

The single most important step is having clean geographical data. Power BI’s mapping service, which is powered by Bing Maps, is smart, but it needs clear signals to know what to plot.

Your dataset must include a column with location data, such as:

• Country names ("United States", "Canada")
• State or Province names ("California", "Ontario")
• Counties ("Los Angeles County")
• City names ("Seattle")
• ZIP or Postal codes ("90210")

For this example, let's assume we have a simple Excel sheet with two columns: State and Total Sales.

Pro Tip: To avoid ambiguity (e.g., Bing Maps confusing Washington state with Washington D.C.), you can use multiple columns like Country and State together or categorize your data. To do this, go to 'Data view' on the left, select your column, and in the 'Column tools' tab at the top, change the 'Data category' to something specific like 'State or Province.'

Step 2: Add the Filled Map Visual to Your Report

With your Power BI report open, find the Visualizations pane on the right side. Look for the globe icon labeled 'Filled map' and click it. An empty map visual will appear on your report canvas.

Step 3: Add Your Data to the Visual's Fields

Now, it's time to bring the map to life. Select the map visual you just created. The Visualizations pane will now show a set of fields for that specific visual:

• Location: This is where your geographical data goes. Drag your 'State' column from the 'Data' pane into this field. You'll see the map populate with the borders of your states.
• Legend: Use this for categorical data. For example, if you had a 'Region' column (e.g., 'West', 'Midwest'), you could drag it here to color each state by its region.
• Color saturation: This field is for numerical data. This is where you will drag your 'Total Sales' column. Once you do, Power BI will automatically color each state based on its sales value, applying a default color gradient. Darker states represent higher sales, and lighter states represent lower sales.
• Tooltips: Drag any additional data fields here to appear when a user hovers over a region on the map. This is perfect for adding context, like 'Number of Customers' or 'Average Deal Size' without cluttering the main visual.

And that’s it! In just a few drags and drops, you've created an interactive filled map showing your sales performance across every state.

Customizing Your Filled Map for Better Insights

A default map is good, but a well-formatted map is great. Power BI offers plenty of customization options to make your map clearer and more professional. To access these, select your map and click the 'Format your visual' icon (the paintbrush) in the Visualizations pane.

1. Data Colors

Tired of the default blue gradient? Under 'Fill colors', you can set your own. Click 'Default color' to pick a new scheme. Or, even better, click the 'fx' button for conditional formatting. This opens up options to apply a diverging color scale (e.g., making low values red, middle values yellow, and high values green) or set specific color rules based on your metrics.

2. Map Styles

Navigate to 'Map settings' > 'Style' to change the underlying Bing Maps theme. You can choose from 'Road' (the default), 'Aerial', 'Dark', 'Light', and 'Grayscale'. The 'Grayscale' and 'Dark' themes are excellent for making your data colors pop, creating a modern and highly readable report.

3. Map Controls

Also within 'Map settings' are controls you can add for your end users. You can enable 'Zoom buttons' to allow users to zoom in and out easily or toggle on 'Auto-zoom' to have the map automatically focus on the plotted data.

4. Category Labels

Want to display the names of the states directly on the map instead of relying only on tooltips? Navigate to 'Category labels' and toggle them 'On'. You can then adjust the font size and color to ensure they’re readable against your map's colors.

An Important Last Tip: Keep It Simple

With so many options, it can be tempting to go overboard. The most effective filled maps are often the simplest. Avoid using too many clashing colors or trying to show too many variables at once. A single, clear story — like sales performance by country or territories by sales manager — works best. Use tooltips to add layers of detail without creating visual noise.

Final Thoughts

Filled maps are a staple of good business intelligence reporting for a reason: they communicate complex geographical data with simple, effective visuals. By preparing your data, configuring the right fields, and applying some thoughtful formatting, you can turn a standard map into the star of your Power BI dashboard, revealing trends that might have otherwise gone unnoticed.

Creating visuals like this in Power BI is a massive step up from spreadsheets, but what if you're pulling data from dozens of different marketing and sales platforms? Manually piecing together Google Analytics traffic by country with HubSpot sales by state can be a significant drag on your week. Our goal with Graphed is to eliminate that friction entirely. By connecting all your tools in one place, we let you create real-time dashboards and reports just by asking questions. You can create a geo map by simply asking, “Show me our Shopify revenue by state for the last 90 days as a filled map,” and our AI analyst builds it for you in seconds — no formatting, data wrangling, or API keys required.