Daily Dose of Excel

Visualize Data with Shapes on a Map

February 28, 2011, 5:21 pm by Tushar Mehta

For a version in a page by itself (i.e., not in a scrollable iframe as below) visit http://www.tushar-mehta.com/publish_train/xl_vba_cases/13-03%20Shapes%20on%20a%20Map.shtml

Tushar Mehta

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7 Comments

David Hager says:

February 28, 2011 at 6:32 pm

Louisiana: coming back after Hurricane Rita.
Kevin says:

March 1, 2011 at 8:05 am

This is great.
Tushar Mehta says:

March 1, 2011 at 12:11 pm

David: That’s what I thought but since the purpose of the post was to focus on how to show patterns on a map I didn’t spend any time exploring the causes underlying any of the patterns.

Kevin: Thanks.
steve black says:

March 1, 2011 at 12:39 pm

The trouble with maps and charts done like this is that they exhibit all the problems of 3-D charts with few of the benefits of maps. Visualization experts would argue that the gains from geographic mapping are swamped by the problems of the 3-D chart type. In some cases careful design of the specific map and chart can minimize the problem, but the effort required is not proportionate to the benefit.

Two suggestions:
1 Use excel to colour the shapes on the map rather than add charts. Heatmap style maps are usually easy to interpret (but suffer from comparability problems when large and small states are compared).

2 Build an interactive map linked to a table (and perhaps make the table sortable) so a user can see a simple table where comparison is easy but when they click on a specific state they also get the geography highlighted in the map.
Lejbl says:

March 2, 2011 at 5:05 pm

A remarkable application made in Excel referred to Steve’s comment

http://www.clearlyandsimply.com/clearly_and_simply/2010/02/spice-up-your-choropleth-maps-with-excel.html
Robert says:

March 3, 2011 at 2:51 am

Lejbl,

one remark: all Choropleth Map templates on Clearly and Simply are based on Tushar’s original approach described here:

http://www.tushar-mehta.com/publish_train/xl_vba_cases/0301-dashboard-conditional_shape_colors.htm

I simply “borrowed” Tushar’s brilliant idea, applied it to other maps and added some additional features. It is and stays Tushar’s brainchild.

Just saying.
Gergo says:

March 16, 2011 at 6:22 am

I just finished my first Europe “heatmap” in excel Thanks for the links and tips you shared in the last couple of months! By the way it is often advisable to use a logarithmic scale when creating choropleth maps.
Cheers!