Power BI – Maps not displaying the correct location.

Here’s a common issue with potentially an easy fix (depending on your geography).

You have location data in your dataset, but when Power BI displays it on a map, it gets it all wrong. This looks especially bad, for some reason, when using Q and A. In the image below you’ll see that for the state WA representing “Western Australia”, Power BI actually plots this to WA in the USA ( Washington State ).

Now you can try and update the data field to include the country name, ( ie. “WA, Australia ), and that solves it some cases but not for my report. What I had to ALSO do was also go to the Table View, select the column ( in this case my new column with the country name – the old one was hidden ) and at the top, change the Data Category to “Place”.

After doing that, it works !