1. Prerequisites

Before we begin, there are a few things that we need to ensure.

Clone the GitHub repository

We need these to be available locally for the user to edit. The project repository is available here.

You can either use git clone command line functionality or download all files from the repository as a compressed folder.

After downloading or cloning these files, this is how the directory structure should look like-

- lead-service-line-map
  - Assets
  - Data
  - docs
  - LICENSE
  - README.md
  - Lead Service Line Map.pbix

We will discuss these dependencies in greater detail in the 'get and transform data' section.

Power BI

This tool uses Microsoft Power BI for mapping and data visualization. Power BI can be installed from here.

Microsoft has some great free tutorials on Power BI and it's a very widely used tool. However, its major drawback is its incompatibility with Mac OS devices. We recommend users to use a Windows virtual machine to replicate these steps if they don't have access to a Windows machine locally.

If you want to publish a report to the cloud, then you will also need a basic Power BI license. You can find more information about this in Power BI's documentation. Note that you do not need any licenses for this tutorial.

GeoJSON editor

Data cleaning is a part of this tutorial. To follow this, we'll need access to a GeoJSON editor. Most programming languages make it very easy to modify GeoJSON files (for example, the GeoPandas library for Python), but users may also choose to do this using free web tools like geojson.io.

Spreadsheet tool

We will need access to a spreadsheet tool that's able to edit comma-separated (CSV) files. For example, Microsoft Excel.