It's day 21 of the 30 Day Map Challenge and today's theme is "Icons".
Create a map where icons, pictograms, or custom symbols are the main focus. Use them to highlight points of interest or replace traditional cartographic features.
Today's theme is Icons - and given we're creating our maps using Icon Map Slicer - we have a few ways to add icons to the map. I've pulled in some OpenStreetMap data showing the locations of supermarkets in Edinburgh.
The Power BI report has multiple pages.
***Page 1 - Logos. ***
In the Power BI report dataset, I've included URLs for each of the supermarket brands pointing to SVG images (PNG and JPG images are also supported). Whilst are hosted by Wikimedia and work well, there are some requirements for hosting the images yourself. They are described in this blog post. Otherwise you can create data: urls and store the images in your dataset.
The image URL is assign to the Image / WKT / GeoJSON field, along with the unique ID for that location, and the longitude and latitude.
To ensure that the images are the correct dimensions without being stretched, I've also include width and height in pixels and applied these to the width and height formatting settings using conditional formatting.
Page 2 - Letters/Symbols
For the 2nd page, I'm just showing the first letter of the supermarket brand - using Icon Map Slicer to generate the icon for us. We therefore don't need the logo URL, so I've removed it from the image configuration.
Then in the formatting settings, I've set the Image Source to be "Icon" instead of "URL from data". The text can be a unicode symbol, or any text. In this case I've used the "fx" button to assign a field from the dataset containing the first letter of the supermarket brand name. I've also assigned the colour to use a field containing a RBG hex colour value, so each icon appears in a different colour.
Page 3 - Names
These generated icons can be whole names - they don't just have to be single letters:
Page 4 - Icon Library
And then finally, clearing the conditional formatting value for the "Text or Icon Path" field, we can instead click the "Show Icon Library" toggle and use Icon Map's Icon Library to search for a suitable icon:
Once selected the "Text or Icon Path" setting is populated with the name of the Icon. This can be bound to a data field to display different icons for each location.
Here's the Power BI report:
and the Power BI .pbix file to download.