Scatter chart
A scatter chart is a visual that plots many data points using an x and y axis for typically two categories or variables that you select. Scatter charts are the same as scatter plots, which are often used in statistics for visualizing data. Scatter charts can also be color-coded to show different categories of values that can be plotted across the same x and y axes, which will help show the relationship between the two categories of values.
Power BI can render up to a maximum of 10,000 data points in a scatter chart.
Scatter charts can also be used instead of a line chart when you want to change the scale of the horizontal axis.
Figure 9.22 – Scatter chart showing gross profit across date and regions
You can also have a date field as a play axis. This will allow you to “play” your data. The play will change over time and the data points will move as the data changes by date.
Map visuals
Power BI provides multiple ways of communicating geographical information. The first is the map visual, which allows you to plot data on a map in a very straightforward way, where numeric values or a percentage of the whole values can be overlayed on a map showing a geography. The map visual uses Microsoft Bing Maps as the core geography data.
There are also other map visuals, such as filled map, shape map, Azure map, and ArcGIS map visuals, which allow plotting data on a map in different ways. The shape map, for example, is useful when you only want the shape of a geographical region and not the whole map. For example, when plotting values by state in the United States, the map visual will show both Alaska and Hawaii on a map and then plot the values over the map. The shape map will start with just the outline of the contiguous states and then add Alaska and Hawaii to the corners of the visual, as shown in Figure 9.23.
The filled map visual combines the shape map’s ability to fill in space in a mapped geographic region but overlays it on top of the Bing map of the regular map visual. The Azure map visual uses the Azure service Azure Maps and uses supplemental data from other parties, such as road, satellite, night, and terra layers, for displaying maps. ArcGIS Maps for Power BI uses the ArcGIS service developed and maintained by Esri.
Figure 9.23 – Map and shape map visuals showing population data for the United States