Most business data has a location hiding in it: a billing city, a delivery pin code, a store address. Tables and bar charts flatten that dimension. Power Map, a free add-in for Excel 2013 (renamed 3D Maps and built into Excel from 2016 onwards), puts the same rows on an interactive 3D globe in a few clicks.
What Power Map does well
- Plots thousands of rows by country, state, city, postal code, address or latitude/longitude.
- Shows values as stacked or clustered columns, bubbles, heat maps or filled regions.
- Animates data over time, so you can watch sales roll out across regions month by month.
- Records "tours" — sequences of scenes — that can be exported as video for presentations.
Preparing the data
Power Map is only as good as its geocoding. Before launching it:
- Format the range as a table (
Ctrl + T) with clear column headers. - Split location into explicit columns — City, State, Country — rather than one free-text address. "Lucknow" alone is ambiguous; "Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India" is not.
- Use a real date column if you want to animate over time. Text that only looks like a date will not work.
- Aggregate where you can. Hundreds of thousands of rows will render, but a pivot to daily or weekly totals makes tours far smoother.
Building your first map
Select any cell in the table and choose Insert → Map → Launch Power Map (in newer versions, Insert → 3D Map). The layer pane opens on the right:
- Geography: tick your location fields and confirm the level each represents. Check the match confidence indicator — low confidence means Excel guessed.
- Height: drag the value you want to measure, such as Revenue, and pick the aggregation (sum, average, count).
- Category: add a field such as Product Line to split columns by colour.
- Time: add your date field and choose whether data accumulates, stays for a period, or replaces the previous value.
Tip: switch between column and heat-map views on the same data. Columns are better for comparing exact values; heat maps make clusters and gaps obvious at a glance.
Scenes and tours
A scene is a saved camera position plus layer settings. Add several — a national view, then a zoom into your two strongest states, then a time-lapse of a new region — and Power Map plays them as a tour with smooth transitions. Create Video exports the tour at presentation or full-HD quality, which works well in board decks where nobody wants to wait for a live demo.
Limitations to keep in mind
- Geocoding relies on Bing Maps and needs an internet connection.
- Very large datasets slow down noticeably; pre-aggregate in Power Pivot or a pivot table.
- It is an exploration and storytelling tool. For dashboards that many people use daily, a BI platform with proper access control is the better home.
Where we use it today
Even with full BI stacks available, we still reach for 3D Maps in early discovery workshops. Putting a client's raw sales export on a globe during the first meeting often surfaces questions — why is this region empty, why does that city spike every March — that shape the whole analytics roadmap.
