Fixing Fryslân in Power BI’s The Netherlands provinces Shape Map

Provinces of the Netherlands, there seems to be no data for province of Friesland.

Recently I was looking for a neat way in visualising certain events in The Netherlands. Luckily Power BI has a nice Shape Map visualisation, which is a lot nicer than the ‘ol Bing Maps viz.

And the developers of Power BI even took the liberty to add our small country of The Netherlands. Creating a heat map of the Netherlands showed something odd, it looked like no data was available for the province of Friesland.

But I knew for sure there are events in the dataset for Friesland, but it seems that the name that Microsoft assigned to the Friesland is Fryslân, which is Frysian and not commonly used in The Netherlands. This issue has been addressed for a while, back in 2016 on the Power BI forums. After digging some more I found out that apparently Fryslân ultimately is the agreed upon spelling of the province, but in day to day use people tend to use Friesland.

To fix this issue I first thought of making use of the option of uploading a custom TopoJson file using the + Add map button. But it was hard to find a just as nice looking shape map as the default one. If I just could edit the name of the province the map will suit all of my needs. This is what I did.

I figured that the TopoJson file would be either stored in the installation folder of Power BI, or otherwise in the .PBIX-package itself. Since the latter was the easiest option, I started there. Opening up the file in 7zip I found the TopoJson file stored inside the Report → Resources → StaticResources → RegisteredResources folder.

The TopoJson file inside of the PBIX file, with the incorrect naming

Now the easiest way in fixing this is unzipping this file to an other location. Here you should edit the file (change Fryslân to Friesland), and then inside of Power BI upload it as custom map to your Shape Map visualisation.

To save you the hassle of doing all this I took the liberty to upload a fixed version of the TopoJson of The Netherlands’ provinces. You can download it right here.

If you found this helpful please don’t forget to leave some claps, any questions feel free to contact me!