Data preparation

Note:

Some workflows may require specific privileges. For more information about user types, roles, and privileges, see the Accounts topic.

ArcGIS for Microsoft 365 matches locations in the data to locations on a map. The more you organize and prepare the data before you add it to the map, the more accurate the map results will be. See Data and geocoding to learn more about data.

When you add a data layer to a map, you choose the location type that best represents the information. Location information from the data is used to create a relationship between the data and the specified location type. Although ArcGIS for Microsoft 365 includes functionality to provide a location on the map based on the best available location data, preparing and organizing the data to align with expected location types helps ensure greater accuracy.

Location types

The following location types are used:

Location type	Value	Description
Coordinates	Latitude, Longitude	Latitude and longitude values represent an x,y coordinate location on the map. You can map x,y coordinate data in either the WGS84 or the Web Mercator coordinate systems. If the latitude (y) values fall between -90 and 90 and the longitude (x) values range from -180 to 180, use WGS84. If the latitude and longitude values are in meters and have six, seven, or eight digits before (to the left of) the decimal point, use Web Mercator. You can use degrees/minutes/seconds notation to map data. You can also choose one of the other coordinate systems that ArcGIS supports. For more information, see Supported notation formats.
Address	Address	The more address elements the data contains, the more accurate the results will be. A complete list of countries for which there is address coverage is available in the supported countries list on the ArcGIS Geocoding service coverage page. Your ArcGIS administrator may impose user credit limits on some features and you may receive a message indicating that you have insufficient credits to perform a request. If so, contact your administrator. You can add a maximum of 3,500 address points to an ArcGIS for Power BI visualization as a guest user or 10,000 points if you are signed in to an ArcGIS account. The Location field well accepts only a single value. Consequently, if the address information is contained in separate columns, it is important to combine the information into a single, comma-separated location column. You can then add the combined column data to the Location field well to add data to the map.
	Neighborhood
	City
	Subregion
	Region
	State
	Province
	Postal code
	United States ZIP Code
	Country
Esri JSON		Esri JSON encodes both geometry and feature information into objects. An Esri feature set is a collection of features with the same geometry type and coordinate system. In a JSON document, a feature set is represented by a JSON object. The JSON object has three keys: geometryType, spatialReference, and features. For more information, see Esri JSON. You can use the ArcGIS Connectors for Power Automate Get geometry from feature layer action to get geometry or boundary information from a feature layer and export it as Esri JSON. If the data contains location information that has been formatted using Esri JSON, it appears in a Shape column. Drag the Shape value into the Location field well to draw Esri JSON locations on the map. Esri JSON supports points, lines, and polygons.
Standard administrative boundaries		See the Standard administrative boundaries section below.

Standard administrative boundaries

When you use standard administrative boundaries in the Location field, ArcGIS for Power BI first searches for specific settings in the column's data category metadata. If the data is in the State or Province, Postal code, County, or Country/Region category, ArcGIS for Power BI uses a standard geography query to locate the items on the map.

Note:

In some cases, a location, such as a ZIP code, may be associated with nonresidential post office boxes or related nonresidential services. These locations do not have boundaries associated with them, and the GeoEnrichment Service does not maintain demographic data for this type of location. If you are creating a map using nonresidential locations, use the Points location type. Using the Boundaries location type will result in errors during geocoding.

If no metadata is found, ArcGIS for Power BI searches for supported keywords in the name of the data fields that correlate to standard administrative boundaries. The following table lists the standard administrative boundaries and related keywords. Keywords are not case sensitive.

Location type	Supported keywords	Shape type
Address	city, cities, addr, address, street, town, capital	Point
United States state	state, states	Polygon
ZIP code	zip, zips, zipcode, zipcodes, zip code, zip codes, postal code	Polygon
United States county	county, counties	Polygon
World city	city, cities	Point
World country	country, countries	Polygon

If a keyword is found, ArcGIS for Power BI uses the ArcGIS GeoEnrichment Service to add polygon locations to the map. For a complete list of supported countries, see GeoEnrichment coverage.

Administrative boundaries are added to the map as polygons, which represent both the shape and the location of the place.

If ArcGIS for Power BI cannot find recognizable metadata or keywords, it sends the data in text form to the ArcGIS Geocoding service to find point locations. In many cases, this results in inaccurate findings because there is not enough information to determine the locations. Use the Location type tab on the Layers pane to specify the location parameters.