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Microsoft Places

Using Icons With Microsoft Places

Points of Interest, Icons and Labels are Extremely Useful on Floor Plans..

An office map should display more than just bookable resources like meeting rooms and desks.

As a matter of course, our floor plan design team includes essential navigation and safety and accessibility icons such as main entrances, WCs, accessible WCs, fire exits, stairs and lifts.

There’s other key amenities and ‘points of interest’ we include to help people find their ideal workspace:

The all-important coffee facilities being top of most people’s list, but also facilities like printers and scanners, recycling points, water coolers, etc.

Displaying these features on a map enhances usability and supports various practical and wellbing considerations.

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Many workspace booking systems use graphical formats (e.g. PNG or SVG) and other proprietary mapping systems, that mean you’re free to add any features you want and to style them with whatever icons you want.

For example, you can see plenty of extra features, icons and labels on this SVG format floor plan:

In this update we’ll look at how Microsoft Places floor plans might be used to display such ‘points of interest’, and where Places is now in this respect.

Does Microsoft Places Support Icons?

The maps (floor plans) used in Microsoft Places support the Indoor Mapping Data Format (IMDF) standard.

IMDF uses a structured data approach to representing your indoor spaces, including the ‘features‘ which represent specific areas or objects in your office spaces.

Types of Features in the IMDF standard include:

  • Amenities: WCs, coffee areas, printers, vending machines.
  • Accessibility: Wheelchair ramps, accessible doors, elevators.
  • Points of Interest: Reception desks, emergency exits, cafes.

Each feature can have extra information defined, like:

  • A WC might indicate if it’s accessible or for male, female or gender neutral
  • A printer might include its availability or what it can do.

Most IMDF platforms offer standard symbols (universal icons) – see more on this below.

The IMDF framework also allows for custom icons that can override default icons. The framework also supports the concept of adding in custom layers that can be used to provide more visual information to enhance the viewer’s experience.

However, Microsoft Places currently does not give you the freedom to create your own icons and points of interest or layers.

This is why:

Support for such customisations, is down to the platform you’re working with offering this facility – e.g. via an SDK or other tools.

As yet – we can see no indication of the ability to customise Microsoft Places visually with a published API or otherwise. Perhaps this will come in time….perhaps someone from Microsoft can comment!

What Icons etc are Currently Supported in Microsoft Places?

As of January 2025, Microsoft has implemented a few default icons based on feature categories. These are the ones we have found so far:

  • Restroom (WCs)
  • Elevator (lift)
  • Stairs/Escalator (same icon)

Notice we say ‘found’. There is currently no documentation on what is implemented and what isn’t.

IMDF has many features that could potentially be used to generate such niceties as icons, text labels, colours, varying line styles and shape fills.

Currently Microsoft Places has a limited palette of interpretation: A single colour and line style, no text labelling and limited use of icons.

Below is an example of a simple map in Microsoft Places. You can see in this map an example of the icons we discovered that are implemented: stairs and restroom.

There are other standard icons based on IMDF categories we’d love to see implemented in Microsoft Places.

These would be valuable for office features: kitchen, first aid, emergency exit, classroom, printer, etc.

It would also be good if these could be customised, but in the meantime here’s a workaround you can use to add more features to your floor plans.

Workaround:

In the absence of icons you can include polygons in your IMDF files to represent your own features.

Below we’ve used a multi-polygon coffee cup to represent the hospitality area and a non-bookable table and chairs using simple polygons to represent the ‘Breakout and Informal Working’ area.

As ever – we’ll update this article as we see more features come along.

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