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Office365 May Updates Enhance Power Map

In the May 2015 update for Office 365, Power Map users get a number of enhancements and new features.
Unfamiliar with Power Map?  It’s one of the “Power Tools” that are part of the Power BI offering as included in Excel 2013 and Excel Pro Plus in Office 365,  Power Map provides some very cool presentation capability around geospatial data.  Basically, it’s a data storytelling tool oriented around geospatial data.   It integrates with Bing Maps to provide various 3D visualizations of geographically oriented data (think heat maps and other similar map-oriented data visualizations).  Once you have created your map, you can make a video “Tour” of it and use that for presentations, etc.
To illustrate, here’s a video we made about using this tool:

 
As you can see, the existing features are pretty cool. But this update adds some interesting new ones. First, you can now create Custom Regions in your Power Maps. While it was possible to use various map shapes previously in Power Map, you can now define things like Sales Regions, School Districts, electoral maps, etc. Additionally, some other great customization features have been added including the ability to control formatting of map legends, to control text box foreground and background color, and more.
Read more about the details here, and happy mapping!

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Andrew Tegethoff

Andy leads Perficient's Microsoft BI team. He has 16 years of IT and software experience with a primary focus on Enterprise Information Management solutions using the Microsoft Data Platform.

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