It’s been a really busy month for me professionally (with the PASS Summit 2013, SQL Saturday Charlotte BI Edition, etc) as well as personally (with a steady stream of family flying in to visit the new born baby as well as looking after a new born baby – how I miss my 8 hrs. of sleep!). I remember people saying to me that things are going to change drastically once you have a baby. Well, what can I say other than it’s 100% true 
. Understandably, I don’t get the same amount of time to spend on blogging and with all the stuff that has been happening behind the scenes, I decided to procrastinate till everything gets a little bit more calmer. That is when I was reading through an article and fell upon this gem of a line from Zip Zaglar – “If you wait until all the lights are “green” before you leave home, you’ll never get started on your trip to the top”. So I decided to shake off my laziness and get started on blogging about a cool feature in Power Map that has not been explored or blogged much – Category Shading for Regions.
The objective of this post is to explore the category shading feature in Power Map as well as try to see what kind of questions can be answered (after all, a feature that just adds flashiness and no business value is not desirable). For this post, I will be using the stats for my blog for visitors from the USA by browsers.
With this data, I created a simple Power Map visualization which shows the number of visitors by state. (Check out this link if you are new to Power Map or need more info on how to create this visualization).
With the above visualization, I can answer questions like – Which state in the US has the most number of readers? I can easily see that California and Texas are where I have got the most number of readers. Now that I have a general understanding of the visitors, I am going to ask a few more specific questions based on the browsers that they are using:-
I) What is the dominant browser for my readers in each of the states?
To answer this question, bring the Browser field to the category and now you should notice an icon which appears on the top-right of the category textbox (denoted by 2 in the image below). Click on the icon and select the No shading option as shown below.
Now, I can see the results for myself. Interestingly, the dominant browser in almost all the states is Internet Explorer. There are a couple of states (6 to be precise) where Chrome is the dominant browser. This brings me to my next question.
II) How dominant are the leading browsers within each state with respect to their competing browsers in that state?
Click on the category shading icon and select the “Shade based on category value within location” option. Now you should see the below visualization.
From this, you can easily see the leading browsers based on the color as well as the shading shows the share for the leading browser. The darker the shade for the color, the more dominant the browser is within the region. For eg, you can see that Internet Explorer is pretty dominant in Alaska as well as North Dakota, while Chrome is pretty dominant in Wyoming. In California, you can see that IE is leading but not by much.
However, when I saw the actual numbers in the tooltip, I found it to be really less. This brought me to my third question.
III) Which states have more visitors and what is the dominant browser there?
Click on the category shading icon and select the “Shade based on category value compared to all other values” option. Now you should see the below visualization
You can see that it is a refined version of the map which was obtained initially by not putting the category field. The darker the color, the more number of visitors I have. So from the above image, we can easily see that the top 4 states by readership counts are California (Internet Explorer), Texas (Internet Explorer), Washington (Internet Explorer) and North Carolina (Chrome). And now looking at the previous image (for Question II) in combination with this image, we can see that the difference is not much and that the competition between the browsers are pretty tight across the states. Also, for the three states where the difference is really big (Alaska, North Dakota and Wyoming), we can see that the counts are pretty small and hence not that significant.
IV) How do the states within the same dominant browser measure up against each other?
For this, click on the category shading icon and select the “Shade based on category value compared to other values in the category” option. Now you should see the below visualization.
From this image, I can see that for Internet Explorer, the top 3 states are California, Texas and Washington & for Chrome, the top 3 states are North Carolina, Iowa and Utah. It is important to understand that there might be other states which has more value for that browser. For eg, California might have more readers using Chrome than North Carolina, but it is not taken into account since Chrome is not the dominant browser there. Time to finish this lengthy post and this will be all from me today. But before I sign off, I wanted to let you know that you can animate this kind of visualization across time by dragging the date field to the time-play axis. This can answer the same 4 questions we asked above across time, which is pretty powerful. Also, we can look at the existing set of data with Power View and answer more interesting questions – a sneak peek of a simple dashboard is given below. Have fun with Power BI till we speak again!
Nice Blog 🙂
Hi, do you know if its possible to map states and countries simultaneously.
For example, our business has data to the state level in the US, but not in Australia and other countries – we only have that data at the country level. Can I plot on the same map, individual states, AND entire countries. This would give me the ability to compare Texas to Mexico for example.
Maybe you could make 2 layers and try to superimpose them on each other?