on 16 Jul 2016 03:23:31
Please add the ability to add a background shapefile to the Map Visual. For instance, in electric transmission usage, the ability to add transmission lines and facilities to the map when looking at electric demand in map view would be extremely helpful.
- Comments (4)
RE: add shapefile to Map visual
The ability to add custom shapefiles would be a huge feature update to the Power BI map.
RE: add shapefile to Map visual
Tableau can utilize shapefiles. Given the partnership that ESRI and powerBI have, I would think shapefiles would be a no brainer. This would foster big time adoption in the mapping community.
RE: add shapefile to Map visual
Mapping in Power BI really needs to be improved to be able to bring in Shape Files. This is a great idea that needs more votes.
RE: add shapefile to Map visual
I don't understand how this only has 6 votes. Power BI can essentially already import point shapefiles (with lats and longs), and this is an extremely useful feature to be able to investigate different sorts of linked data when geographically represented.
Microsoft needs to do the same thing for line and polygon shapefiles. The "shape map" preview feature is a good start on the polygon side, but line shapefiles are also common. I converted a line shapefile to TopoJSON, and while Power BI is able to read it, it doesn't display properly and you can't do anything with it because there is no way to map data to the file.
I don't expect Microsoft to build a full GIS in Power BI, but with their partnership with ESRI, they ought to be able to do more with ArcGIS Online features ("reference layers") that just display them.