Introducing Markers in Azure Maps for Power BI

Microsoft announcing a powerful new capability in the Azure Maps Visual for Power BI: Markers. This feature makes it easier than ever for organizations to create compelling, data-driven location stories—without the need for complex GIS tools.

With Markers, you can:

• Use meaningful icons or custom images instead of basic shapes to represent deliveries, facilities, or assets—think trucks, warehouses, or alerts.
• Scale marker sizes dynamically to reflect metrics such as shipment volume, population density, or sales performance.
• Customize colors and transparency for better contrast and seamless integration with your map.
• Assign distinct icons per category, making reports more visually informative and easier to interpret.

Real-world use cases

• Logistics and Supply Chain: Visualize delivery routes and shipment volumes with truck icons that automatically scale based on shipment size.
• Utilities and Operations: Apply conditional formatting and custom icons to represent asset types, operational statuses, or outage locations—making complex networks easy to interpret briefly.
• Retail and Distribution: Differentiate store categories or performance levels using distinct icons and colors to highlight top-performing or underperforming locations across regions.

Go beyond points: Multi-layered map visuals

Marker Layer works with Path and Reference Layers to show routes, boundaries, and points together for more detailed map visuals (as shown below). To make markers point in the right direction, analysts need to pre-compute the route and the heading at each point, then apply that to the markers to achieve richer, multi-layered map visuals.

Get started

For instance, you may wish to visualize a delivery route that includes multiple delivery points. You can use following sample data where each delivery point includes a Latitude & Longitude data, Path ID for the route and pre-computed angle describing the direction of the route.

Sample data table

1. Open Power BI Desktop or Web and create an Azure Maps visual in your report.
2. Add the Azure Maps visual from the Visualizations pane.
3. Add Latitude & Longitude data and PathID in the Build Pane.
4. In the Format pane, go to Markers and select Icon as the marker type.
5. Choose car icon from the built-in library.
6. Adjust the size.
7. Select fx next to the rotation to adjust the rotation of the car at each delivery point.

Format pane User interface showing different settings for Markers

8. Select ‘angle’ column from the table and then ‘OK’.

Conditional formatting user interface

9. Note that each car icon is rotated according to the value specified in the angle column, visualizing the direction of the delivery route.

Azure Map visual showing delivery route with car markers