Power BI Blog: Azure Maps

Welcome back to this week’s edition of the Power BI blog series.  This week, we look at the Azure Maps visualisation.

Since releasing this Azure Map visual for private Preview over a year ago, Microsoft has added a variety of customisation options to help bring it up to par with their current Map visual.  Now it’s gone fully live.  These additions include support for location name fields (geocoding), Pie chart layers, Filled Map layers and more.

Now it’s fully out in the wild, there are things you might notice:

• When you open a report with an existing Map visual and Azure Maps is enabled for your organisation, you’ll see a window pop up encouraging you to upgrade your Map to an Azure Map

As you might have been able to infer since the release of the visual’s public Preview, Power BI is focusing its development efforts on Azure Maps as the single first-party map visual.  In fact, in a future release, Microsoft will fully deprecate older map visuals and migrate even existing reports over to Azure Maps in order to truly unify all of our map visuals into one.  However, Microsoft encourage you to convert your Maps to Azure Maps now.  This will make sure that you get all the new features as soon as they ship and that your transition is as seamless as possible

• The style of all of Power BI’s map tiles, including in the Azure Maps visual, will be updated. 

Since this will affect all reports, including existing reports, Microsoft is rolling this change out to users over time, so keep an eye out for the new style in your own reports and send them feedback early if you encounter any issues.

Whilst Azure Maps has now reached General Availability, Microsoft’s investment in Azure Maps won’t slow down apparently.  They mention they “…still have even more features and improvements planned for the visual in the coming releases”. 

In the meantime, please remember we offer training in Power BI which you can find out more about here.  If you wish to catch up on past articles, you can find all of our past Power BI blogs here.