At it's most basic level, I am trying to display a CUSTOM shapefile representing what is essentially land cover type across a large province in power bi. The land cover is represented by polygons, which have associated with them attributes (a pretty standard shapefile). This file currently resides on my arcgis account. I have been unsuccessful thus far in finding a way to display this file in my Power BI dashboard. I think the root of my problem is the size of the file.
The best of my knowledge / research has led me to believe the following.
- inserting a "Shapemap" in power bi: I may convert my shapefile to a .topojson for this use case, which may be done using map shaper.org which also allows for reducing the file size by geometry simplification. The maximum geometric simplification I was comfortable with resulted in a .topojson file size of 240,000KB which does not seem to want to load into Power BI (understandably so). One source suggested that, only up to 1,500 points could be plotted in a "shapemap", which seemed far too low considering that any geographic data of any complexity whatsoever will contain far over 1,500 points. One option is that I could break my shapefile into administrative regions to reduce the size of each one. However, this would only reduce the size of the file by a factor of approximately 10 at best. I have my doubts that it will resolve the issue.
- I understand that arcgis map frames within Power Bi do not support custom shapefiles contained within one's arcgis account. Instead, they only support a finite list of boundary files like countries, states, etc. Therefore, this is not an option for my application.
Question:
Do I have a way forward in Power BI? If so, what is the critical step that I am missing here? Or is Power BI not built for this type of visual and analysis, and is better to completely switch gears?
Your help is greatly appreciated! Thanks.