In the first article of this series about Modern SharePoint web parts, we showed in general how to work with the modern page experience in SharePoint Online and SharePoint 2019. In this article we’ll look in detail at two of the built-in web parts you can add to your modern SharePoint page: the Bing Maps and MSN Weather web parts. Both of these web parts relate to a geographic location that you enter.
Bing Maps Web Part
The Bing Maps web part allows you to display a map of any address or point of interest. By default when it’s added to a page, it displays the “road” view of your current location – assuming you have location enabled on your computer. Then simply type in the location you wish the map to display to users, and add a Title if you wish. You can change the current map view to Aerial (satellite), Bird’s eye, or Streetside view (which is not available for all locations).
Bird’s eye view is relatively new and gives an interesting perspective. While in Bird’s eye view, you can click on the Rotate right and Rotate left controls to get a different view from that location.
If you select Aerial or Bird’s eye view, you can choose to turn labels of streets and place names on or off. You can also zoom in and out from within the web part. After you save the page, other users can switch map views, but they cannot change the location, title, or zoom level. The view will always default back to the one you set when the page is reloaded.
If you click to edit the web part, you have the option to show a label for your pin (that is, the location you entered) and what exact text you wish to display. For example, you may want to give your users more information than just the address.
Weather Web Part
The Weather web part is another location-based web part, basically a widget that displays the current temperature and weather icon in the location you choose.
The only configuration option available is to select Fahrenheit or Celsius temperature scale.
After the page is published, individual users can change the temperature scale to whichever they prefer, by clicking on the F or C next to the temperature. This is a nice feature, but it’s not very self-evident that it can be changed by the user. Note that this will only affect that user’s view of the page. Also, when a user changes their preference in one web part, it will be changed for all web parts on the page (for that user), no matter what units were originally configured. Once a user has selected a temperature unit preference, it seems that even clearing the browser cache and cookies does not set it back to the configured units. Just something to be aware of.
Clicking on the MSN Weather link will take the user to the MSN Weather website, with detailed weather for the given location.
The Weather web part might be a nice addition to home sites of different geographic locations. Or you could add several Weather web parts to a main page, each displaying the weather in one of your organization’s locations. This web part probably works best in a 1/3-width column.
September 2019 update: You can now add multiple locations within the same Weather web part (see below), rather than needing to add multiple web parts to a page. Clicking on the edit icon within a location allows you to edit the name of the location – if, for example, you wanted it to just say London. Note that changing the temperature scale as described above affects the scale on all locations within the web part, whether in the configuration or by the user clicking on the scale. So if you wish to display degrees F for some locations and C for others, you would still need to use multiple Weather web parts.
Weather web part updateNOTE: Neither the Bing Maps web part nor the Weather web part are currently available for SharePoint Server 2019. They’re only available in SharePoint Online.
Would be good to configure the date format to Australian