Saturday, October 26, 2013

Region Shading and Custom Coloring in Power Map


Region Shading

At PASS Summit, I was excited to hear that Power Map added a Region Shading feature in the September Release. Out of SSRS, Power View, and Power Map, the only one to previously have region shading was SSRS. Now this feature is available in Power Map by country, province/state, county, and zip code.

I finally had a chance to play around with this new feature today, and thought I'd try it out against some data that I had previously Power Mapped. In a previous blog post, I discussed how you could use a city layer with column bars and a state/province layer with bubble charts to display data by both city and province.

Now you can use the new Region option shown below to implement region shading.


Below are the results with Region Shading

SQL Saturday OKC Registrations for 2012 by City and State


 September Release
Used new Region Shading and Custom Color Features
In the above example, the shading intensity represents the province's registration count relative to the other provinces.

Here's the April release results, without region shading.

April Release
There was no region shading, so the bubbles represented registration by province.


Custom Coloring

Post-Summit I heard about Power Map adding custom coloring in the September release. When initially trying out Power Map this is something I quickly wanted and expected end users would want as well. I was happy to see how quickly this got added. Below is how to use this feature.

In Layer Options, you may use the color option below to select the color to use per category value. The color selection option is available for region shading, column bars, and bubbles.


When trying this option out, I was glad to see so many colors available and that assignments were per category value. In the below example I had event year categories of 2007 - 2013. I was able to select a different color for each value.

SQL Saturdays in North America 
by Province by First Event Year
Used new Region Shading and Custom Color Features


Video: SQL Saturdays in North America 
by Province by First Event Year

Used the new Create Video feature in Power Map

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