You can now add icon or image markers to an Azure map

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Power BI Desktop updates for January 2026 Part two of a six-part series of blogs
This month's update brings customisable markers for Azure maps, a new colour picker and the ability to reset part of the formatting only for a visual. Power BI Desktop updates for January 2026 You can now add icon or image markers to an Azure map (this blog) You can now reset part of the formatting of a visual The colour picker has been revamped The Q&A visual is being deprecated Modern visual tooltips are now on general release

Power BI Desktop updates for January 2026

Part two of a six-part series of blogs

This month's update brings customisable markers for Azure maps, a new colour picker and the ability to reset part of the formatting only for a visual.

Power BI Desktop updates for January 2026
You can now add icon or image markers to an Azure map (this blog)
You can now reset part of the formatting of a visual
The colour picker has been revamped
The Q&A visual is being deprecated
Modern visual tooltips are now on general release

Posted by Andy Brown on 27 January 2026

In this blog

Setting icon markers
The range scaling options
Using images as markers

Have you ever wanted to be able to add markers to your Azure maps, and customise them within inches of their lives? Well, now you can!

Here I'm showing sales with a rotated red aeroplane icon (a strange choice, perhaps).

There seems to be a problem at the moment: when you choose the default circular icon only some of the markers adopt the colour and formatting you've set. This is a very small bug (if indeed it is that) which will probably be ironed out soon in an update, but I thought it worth mentioning.

Setting icon markers

You can set markers for maps in a fairly intuitive way:

The Markers card in the Azure visual's formatting properties.

You can then choose which markers you want to change:

You can change the appearance of all markers, or individual ones.

Here are the settings I used for the markers above:

The markers are red planes rotated by 50 degrees; if you look closely you can see they also have a thick navy blue border.

Here is the current choice of markers:

If you choose to show markers as images (see below) you will have an infinite choice!

The range scaling options

When setting markers you can choose to scale by Magnitude or by Data range (or Auto, which lets Power BI choose):

The options for range scaling.

To understand this, here are some figures for the visual above:

Shopping centre	Total sales	Notes
Market Place	208	The centre with the lowest total sales figure
The Trafford Centre	718	The centre with the highest total sales figure

For the settings above, here's what will happen:

Range scaling option	What will show
Magnitude	Markers will be scaled from 0 up to 718 (so the Market Place marker will be (208 / 718) of the size of the Trafford Centre one).
Data range	Markers will be scaled from 208 to 718 (so the Market Place marker will be 2px big, and the Trafford Centre one 31px).

Using images as markers

It is of course more fun to use images for your markers:

Choose the marker type as Image to open up a whole new world!

You can then paste in a URL to the .svg image you want to use, or even paste in the HTML for the image itself:

The URL (to a yellow star image, as it happens).

However, I can't get this to work, regardless of how I paste in the path to the .SVG image. I suspect that getting an Azure map to use a complicated image as a marker is just too much for the screen processing algorithm to handle, but would welcome anyone else's experiences of this!

Parts of this blog
Power BI Desktop updates for January 2026 You can now add icon or image markers to an Azure map (this blog) You can now reset part of the formatting of a visual The colour picker has been revamped The Q&A visual is being deprecated Modern visual tooltips are now on general release

Some other pages relevant to these blogs include:

You can also book hourly online consultancy for your time zone with one of our 7 expert trainers!

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Setting icon markers

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