Styling points on the map
Once you have added points, you can control how they are displayed. For the marker points layer, you can control both the size and the colour of points according to values of a field from your Power BI data, or by changing all points together.
Point display is controlled by selecting the "Markers (points-only) Layer" dropdown under the Symbology Settings pane of the Format Visual controls:
The controls that appear under this pane will vary depending what other data you have added to the visual - you will not necessarily see all the controls visible in the image above.
Changing the size or colour of all points together
If you have not added any data to the point colour or point size fields on the Build Visual pane, then the symbology settings pane will appear like this. You can change the colour, opacity, size, and border thickness of all point markers. Note that the colours appearing in the colour picker are taken from the current Power BI report theme.
Varying the size of points
It’s quite common that you might want to vary the size (radius) of the points on a map to represent an increase in occurrence or density (for example, larger points represent a greater number of crimes at a location).
To do this, having plotted points on a map, drag a data column containing numeric data into the Points: Size field of the visual. Then, if there are multiple points at each location, you can click on the downward arrow of that field and select an appropriate summary. Now the size of your points will be based off the value of the single data point at that location, or a summary of all the values at that location. (Note that if there are multiple points at one location and no summary is applied, a warning will be shown in the notifications pane).
At this point the symbology pane will update to show controls allowing you to control the range of sizes of the points on the map, instead of a single size control. Additionally the map legend will update to show the size of points as they appear on the map.
The "Points size % clip" slider allows you to reduce the effect of outliers on the appearance of points. The values above and below these percentiles will be excluded from the scaling calculation.
Varying point size in the OS Maps for Power BI Visual
You can combine the colouring of points based on categorical data and the size of points by another data attribute to represent two different variables in a single point within your data.
Point size only accepts a numeric data type.
The map legend will update to show a visualisation of the point sizes, enabling your viewers to understand what size corresponds to what value.
See an example below showing a combination of categorical data (crime type) and point size variation (count of crime).
Varying the colour of points
You can also vary the colour of points on the map according to a variable from your Power BI data. Add the appropriate field to the Points: Colour field of the visual to do this. This can be a numeric field or a non-numeric field.
If you add a numeric field, the points will be coloured by ramping / interpolating colours between two endpoints that you can choose on the Symbology Settings pane. If you add any other field, this will be treated as "categorical" data and each unique value will be given a distinct colour. This would be appropriate for data that's divided into groups, such as age, gender, occupation, etc.
Using numeric data
When you add a numerical field the symbology settings pane will update to include these controls:
The "Points colour % clip" control works in exactly the same way as the one for sizes, allowing you to exclude outliers from the colour ramping so that you can see the range of variation in the data that is of most interest.
The map legend will update to show a visualisation of the colour ramp enabling your viewers to understand what colour corresponds to what value.
Using categorical data
When you add a non-numeric field to the Points: Colour field well, the symbology settings pane will update to include these controls:
Up to 12 different categories within your data will be allocated unique colours. (It is likely to be hard for your viewers to distinguish more than this number of unique colours on the map). Any additional unique values will be displayed in a single grey colour.
The "Use recommended colours for categorical data" toggle means that a fixed palette of colours will be used to symbolise the data, and the colour dropdowns will be ignored. This palette has been chosen to maximise contrast between each value, whilst considering the needs of those with colour vision deficiencies. If categorical data are also present in the Features Layer then a different palette will be used for each layer to ensure the two can be distinguished.
If the toggle is disabled, then the colours will be interpolated between the "First point colour" and "Last point colour" values.
The map legend will update to show a visualisation of the colour / value pairs, enabling your viewers to understand what colour corresponds to what value.
If you need to override the colour for one or more values, you can achieve this by specifying the relevant colour hex code (for example, #cdf1f0) in the colour field in your Power BI data. If the visual sees a value like this, it will recognise it as a colour and use it directly, overriding the symbology settings described above.
Adding hex codes into your data to manipulate the point colours won’t update the category colours within the legend.
Adding clickable point pop-ups
Additional information about a point can be displayed as a pop-up when a point on the map is clicked.
To add a pop-up to a point on the map, drag and drop data into the Points: Pop-ups field in the Visualization pane. Information included in the pop-up field will be shown when a user clicks on a point.
You can add more than one field to the Points: Pop-ups field well and they will be shown in a table in the pop-ups. You can re-order the fields in the field well to control the order in which they display in the pop-ups. You can configure the formatting of fields using the standard Power BI field formatting tools (under Format visual / General / Data format) e.g. to display numbers as currency.
Point pop-ups
Multiple data columns can be shown under pop-ups.
By enabling point pop-ups based on different data attributes, points that appear in the same location can be distinguished on the map (see screenshot below, where points at the same location have different crime type data).
Handling overlapping points on a map using pop-ups
It’s quite common that points on a map might have identical locations, making the data more difficult to understand. For example, when considering crime data, a shoplifting crime and a violent crime may have been recorded to the same x, y coordinates or postcodes; however, only one point can be shown at each location.
If this is the case with your data and you then add a field to symbolise by colour or size, this may be hard to understand on the map. In this situation, a warning will be generated in the notifications pane, telling you that the data contains duplicate point locations, so that you can decide how to handle this.
For numerical data, it may be appropriate to apply a summary to the colour / size field to show, for example, the total number of people affected at a given location. For other forms of data, especially categorical, this will be less appropriate. In this case, you can add a suitable column that distinguishes points to the Points: Pop-ups field. The pop-up at these locations will then be paginated, allowing viewers to see all the values occurring at that location.
Below is an example of a pop-up where data representing crime type is being used to enable pagination of overlapping points; the pop-up shows there are five points representing different crime types in the same location:
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