Day 17 of the 30 Day Map Challenge and today's theme is "A New Tool":
Challenge Classic: Experimentation is key! Create your map using a software, language, library, or technique you have never used before.
So for today's challenge I've built some additional capabilities into Icon Map Slicer that we'll include in the next release.
In yesterday's challenge, I showed how effective spatial grids such as H3 can be for bucketing large volumes of point data to display with in Power BI.
We’ve supported H3 hexagon grids in Icon Map Pro and Slicer since day one. But recently, Felix Palmer introduced A5, a new global grid system built entirely from pentagons. Unlike H3 - where most cells are hexagons but a handful are special pentagons - A5 uses the same pentagon shape everywhere. That consistency means A5 avoids the small distortions and odd edge cases you sometimes get with H3, giving you more even-sized cells, simpler neighbour relationships, and cleaner results when you’re analysing or aggregating data.
I've added the ability to bucket longitude and latitude coordinates as A5 cells, or provide the cell IDs in data, and Icon Map Slicer will render the pentagons. These can be coloured based on the aggregated values in the data, and extruded in 3D.
I've also added support for S2 so there are now three spatial index choices in Icon Map Slicer.
Here's the Power BI report:
and .pbix file to download. You will need to ensure you're using at least version 1.0.0.4 of Icon Map Slicer with Power BI Desktop in developer mode.