What are the best courses for a Geospatial Consultant?

[summitgeo]

As a GIS Consultant working in the energy/renewables sector, I am starting my learning pathway with PowerBI in order to support clients with geospatially enabled infographics for their websites, and to create data dashboards which users can interact with seamlessly between charts, tables and maps.

I have seen the Geospatial Analysis In Power BI course. But note that it’s only 1 hour long, so might not be as in-depth as I’m hoping.

Are there other courses that compliment the course above and will help me on the way to going from ‘Zero to Hero’ with PowerBI in GIS?

[ektx]

@summitgeo ,

There are a number of map-focused visuals available in Power BI, such as the default Maps visual, Shape Maps visual, Azure Maps visual, ArcGIS for Power BI visual, Mapbox visual, Icon-Map visual, etc., each with its own set of features and limitations. It would probably be worth your time to experiment with each of these to understand their functionality and limitations so you can position them properly in your toolkit.

I’m not aware of formal “courses” for these; however many of them have short “tutorials” in the form of blog posts. A few examples:

• https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-maps/power-bi-visual-get-started
• https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/visuals/desktop-shape-map
• https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/visuals/power-bi-visualizations-arcgis
• https://learn.arcgis.com/en/paths/try-arcgis-for-power-bi/
• https://docs.mapbox.com/help/tutorials/power-bi/
• https://www.discoverei.com/blog/welcome-to-icon-map

Also, while Power BI map visuals are certainly helpful to integrate relatively simple maps along with other visuals or analyses, much of the “heavy lifting” in geospatial analysis is done using geospatial platforms such as Esri’s ArcGIS platform. Esri offers a variety of free and paid courses and tutorials, albeit not specific to Power BI (except for their ArcGIS for Power BI tutorial listed above). See:

• https://learn-arcgis-learngis.hub.arcgis.com/
• https://www.esri.com/training/catalog/search/

QGIS, an open source GIS software, has some of its own training here:

• https://www.qgis.org/en/site/forusers/trainingmaterial/index.html

Also check YouTube for related videos.

I hope this helps.

[summitgeo]

Thanks a lot, this is really helpful. I work with ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Enterprise for my day job, so that side of things is already covered, but these additional resources are really helpful.