What Is a Tile Grid Map?
A tile grid map replaces each geographic region — a country's states, provinces, or a continent's countries — with an equally sized tile, arranged in a grid that still roughly resembles the real geography. Every region gets the same visual weight, and color (rather than area) carries the data.
It's a deliberate distortion, and that's the point: on a real choropleth map, a huge, sparsely populated region draws the eye simply because it takes up more pixels, while a small, dense, economically significant region can be nearly invisible.
The Problem With Area-Based Maps
Consider Spain: Madrid, the capital and by far the most economically significant region, is geographically tiny — a dot on the map. Castilla y León, sparsely populated, is enormous. Color a real map of Spain by GDP and Madrid barely registers visually, while the true story — concentrated economic activity in a small area — gets lost entirely. This pattern repeats in almost every country: population and economic activity cluster in small areas, while land area does not.
A tile grid map fixes this by design. Every region — Madrid or Castilla y León, Rhode Island or Texas — is the same size tile. The reader's eye goes straight to the color, which is where the actual data lives.
When to Use One
- Regional sales or revenue by state/province/country, where small-area regions are commercially important
- Population density or demographic data, where land area actively misleads
- Election results, where geographic area and political weight are famously disconnected
- Any regional KPI dashboard where you want every region to get equal visual consideration, not just the biggest ones
If your regions are roughly similar in size and geographic accuracy genuinely matters (logistics routing, catchment radius), a real choropleth map is still the better tool. Tile grids are for when you're comparing regions as categories, not analyzing actual geographic space.
What a Good Tile Grid Map Needs
- Recognizable layout — tiles need to be arranged so the country or region is still identifiable at a glance, not just a random grid.
- A solid color scale — sequential for a single measure going from low to high, diverging when there's a meaningful midpoint (e.g. variance from a target).
- Support for the geography you actually need — built-in grids cover the obvious countries, but plenty of real-world use cases need sales territories, custom regions, or countries that aren't shipped by default.
- Data-point capacity — a small country with a handful of regions is trivial; a large dataset with tens of thousands of coordinate-level records needs real aggregation performance.
Tile Grid Map Pro for Power BI
Tile Grid Map Pro ships with 27 built-in country and region grids and takes latitude/longitude as its only required input — no shapefiles, no GIS software, no region-code lookups.
What it adds
- 27 built-in grids covering major markets out of the box, on both Free and Pro.
- Up to 30,000 data points (Pro) vs. 500 on Free — enough for genuinely large regional datasets.
- Diverging and categorical color scales (Pro), beyond the fixed sequential palette on Free.
- Custom TopoJSON boundaries (Pro) — drag any boundary file onto the visual to render a geography that isn't built in: sales territories, custom districts, countries outside the default 27.
- Boundaries persist inside the .pbix (Pro) — no re-upload every time the report reopens.
- Conditional formatting, rich tooltips (up to 10 fields), cross-filtering and full accessibility included on every tier.
Getting Started
- Install from Microsoft AppSource.
- Bind Latitude and Longitude in decimal degrees (WGS84) — that's the entire required setup.
- Add a Value measure to color the tiles; optionally add Label and Tooltip fields.
- Pro: drag a TopoJSON boundary file onto the visual to render a custom geography.
If area on a real map has ever made a small-but-important region disappear from your dashboard, a tile grid map is the fix — and Tile Grid Map Pro gets you there from raw coordinates, no GIS detour required.