2021 Week 42 | Power BI: Icon Map

Introduction

Welcome to week 3 of mapping month! The Workout Wednesday Power BI team is focusing on maps and geospatial data in Power BI. There are several different maps available in Power BI as default and custom (AppSource) visuals.

Last week we explored how to implement custom maps from Mapbox into Power BI. This week we are focusing on the powerful custom visual created by Microsoft MVP and community leader James Dales – Icon Map. We are barely (barely) scratching the surface of what Icon Map can do, but we want to introduce you to the visual and some of it’s capabilities!

Since we’ve been at home for what feels like a thousand years now, we thought it would be fun to look at all of the possible places we can eventually travel to using OpenFlights route data.

Requirements

Load OpenFlights data
Create relationships between routes data (your fact table) and your dimensions – airports, countries, planes, and airlines.
Download Icon Map
Import the Icon Map custom visual into Power BI by Importing a visual from file

Create a custom background using PowerPoint (or something more sophisticated for those of you with design chops)
Create slicers for source and destination airports
Create an Icon Map using the Airport Lat and Long
Add a custom tooltip displaying the departure and arrival airport and country
In this sample I created a custom theme using colors.co, based on the background map color (light blue). In the creation of this theme I specified the font and default colors.

Dataset

This challenge uses data scraped from 5 tables on the OpenFlights site. Please note the licensing and disclaimer information on OpenFlights.

In Power BI, Get Data from Web and pass in each of the 5 URLS.

After you finish your workout, share on Twitter using the hashtags #WOW2021 and #PowerBI, and tag @JSBaucke, @MMarie, @shan_gsd and @dataveld. Also make sure to fill out the Submission Tracker so that we can count you as a participant this week in order to track our participation throughout the year.

Solution

Watch

There is no solution video for this challenge.

Here is the solution file.

4 thoughts on “2021 Week 42 | Power BI: Icon Map”

Mathias
November 16, 2021 at 6:55 pm

Hello team WOW! Are you uploading the video? I can’t get to the result = (

1. Shannon Lindsay
  November 17, 2021 at 5:05 pm
  
  Hi Mathias! Yes – I am planning to upload the video as soon as I can, apologies for the delay.
  
  1. shravya kulal
    May 4, 2022 at 5:28 am
    
    is the video out?
    
    1. Shannon Lindsay
      May 4, 2022 at 4:49 pm
      
      Hi Shravya – unfortunately I haven’t managed to create a video for this week – it’s in my backlog. Do you have a specific question?
      
      Here is the solution file, hope that helps!