Thursday, June 17, 2010

Chloropleth Maps in Excel

A colleague recently pointed me to a very cool example of creating a chloropleth map directly in Excel.

Wow. Just wow. And if you look at the map itself, you'll see that someone (apparently) meticulously drew out each province as a shape object. (Right-click one of them and you'll see the tell-tale "Edit Points" option.) The VBA written to make this work is also very succinct and simple to follow. Anyone seen one of these for the U.S.?

This is clearly the best example of mapping directly in Excel that I've ever seen. I thought you all might enjoy it as well.

That's all for now...

4 comments:

Excel_Geek said...

Oh keep reading on, Excel_Geek...http://www.clearlyandsimply.com/clearly_and_simply/2009/08/build-your-own-choropleth-maps-with-excel.html

I am super, super impressed by this. Definitely subscribing to the feed over at ClearlyandSimply.com...

Anonymous said...

There is a better solution... without knowing VBA... using BeGraphic free addin. It gives for free four charts including choropleth maps (by copying the conditional formatting of cells on maps).

Little secret : BeGraphic gives away 10 000 maps (yes ten thousands at no charge) to any professional user sending the request using his business email

Excel_Geek said...

Thanks for the tip!

Dave Anthony said...

I've created one of these for the US... been meaning to do a Europe and Asia one as well.