Clearly and Simply

US Choropleth Map by County per State – a 4th Option

Another option to display a Choropleth Map of the United States by County for one user-selected state in Microsoft Excel

The previous post presented three different options to implement a US Choropleth Map by County per State in Microsoft Excel. One approach showed the entire map of the United States and highlighted the selected state (option 2), whereas option 3 filtered the data and only plotted the counties of the selected state.

It was again Leonid Koyfman (who else?), who provided me with an interesting idea for another alternative: Leonid suggested in this comment to combine options 2 and 3 and show both maps in one view. This requires more real estate on the dashboard, but it also combines the advantages of both approaches: it provides a zoomed map of the selected state and keeps the context of this state on the map of the entire USA.

Since the technique will certainly be most useful on a dashboard showing more than just the maps, I created an example visualization with two additional views:

• On the left side of the dashboard the two maps (zoomed selected state and USA) are displayed
• At top right of the visualization a table lists 10 selected counties of the current state: the 10 counties with the highest or lowest unemployment rates. A small new VBA routine assigns the according bin color to each of the 10 counties in the narrow column right to the table
• The band chart at bottom right visualizes minimum, maximum and (unweighted) average of unemployment rates of all counties in the selected state over time

This is just one example how the technique of visualizing maps for a user selected state could be integrated in a more complex dashboard.

If you want to use this on your own dashboard, you may want to play around with the size of the maps and where they are located. Size and position of the zoomed state map are defined by the named range “myMapView”. You can adjust the zoomed map by simply changing the cell reference of this name. As for the map of the USA, you have to group all shapes of the US map first, then resize and reposition this group and finally ungroup it again.

The major disadvantage remains, though: the zoomed map of the selected state makes the distortions visible. These distortions are inevitable in the process of converting SVG-files to freeform shapes in Excel. Well, at least I couldn't find a way to avoid them. The problem depends on the size of the selected state: Texas and California, for instance, still look good as a zoomed map. Rhode Island and Connecticut definitely don’t. A crucial downside, no doubt about it. Unfortunately I do not have a solution for this. A map would be needed which will not be distorted in the ungrouping process, but I couldn’t find a better map than the one used here.

If you are interested, here is the link to download the zipped Excel workbook:

Download US Choropleth County Map per State (zipped Excel workbook, 2.4 MB)

Many thanks go to Leonid for the idea.

Stay tuned.

US Choropleth Map by County per State

How to display a Choropleth Map of the United States by County for one user-selected state

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you certainly know that I am into geographical data visualization. Just click on “Choropleth Maps” in the Categories roll on the right side of the blog and you will see that we already had 18 (!) posts in this category. Some of them discussing maps in Tableau, but most of them dealing with the question how to implement Choropleth Maps or Cartograms in Microsoft Excel.

I thought I would be through with this topic. I really did. However, I recently noticed that there is one common use case for Choropleth Maps in Excel I never wrote about: visualizing one user-selected region of a bigger map. Imagine you have geographical data with a hierarchy, e.g. USA by state and county (to state the obvious for the majority of my readers). It may well be that one of your dashboards is focused on displaying views for one selected state only.

Now, what if one of your views shall be a Choropleth Map? How can you show only the selected part of a map on your dashboard?

Today’s post describes three different options how to do this. As always, the example Excel workbooks are provided for free download without any password protection.

Highlight Actions in Microsoft Excel with Multiselecting

How to implement Highlight Actions in Microsoft Excel with the option to select more than one category (Multiselecting)

Clearly and Simply proudly presents another guest article: Leonid Koyfman, long-time contributor to this blog, enhances the approach to Highlight Actions in Microsoft Excel with the option to select more than one category. Leonid developed an impressively simple and elegant technique. Enjoy.

The recent post Highlight Actions in Microsoft Excel provided a mechanism to replicate Tableau’s highlight actions in Microsoft Excel and focused on the specific use case when a selection of a row within the data table, or a bar of the “bar charts”, automatically highlighted related products on the XY scatter chart and shaded off all other data points.

Getting closer to what can be done in Tableau, the suggested approach lacks an important Tableau functionality: multi-selection. In the Highlight Action Example in Tableau we are not limited to a single item selection. We can select multiple Sub-Categories with a mouse or CTRL-Click and this action will highlight the corresponding data points on the XY scatter chart.

Today’s post includes a set of techniques and tricks to extend the dashboard presented in Highlight Actions in Microsoft Excel to mimic Tableau’s multiselecting feature.

Highlight Actions in Microsoft Excel

How to implement a specific Highlight Action Use Case in Microsoft Excel

Highlight Actions in Tableau allow you to visualize all data points related to a user-selection across different views on a dashboard by coloring the relevant marks and shading off all others.

Highlight Actions are a great feature for interactive data exploration in general, but there is one specific use case where highlighting is extremely useful:

Imagine you have a data set with a hierarchy of dimensions like Product Category|Product Sub-Category|Product, State|County or something similar. If this is the case, chances are that the dashboard will show consolidated results per e.g. Product Sub-Category in a table or Bar Chart and a distribution of all Products by two measures (e.g. Sales and Profit) on an XY Scatter Chart. With a Highlighting Action in place, you can easily click on one Sub-Category in the first view and immediately see all related data (i.e. all Products belonging to this Sub-Category) on the XY Scatter Chart. Highlight Actions are preferable to Filter Actions in this case, because they show the  members of the selected category within the context of the distribution of all data points.

Creating Highlight Actions in Tableau is a piece of cake. A few mouse clicks and you are good to go. But what if you want to have a similar feature on your Excel dashboard? Unfortunately, Excel does not provide actions across views natively, but with a few lines of VBA code and a simple charting trick, you can replicate Tableau’s Highlight Actions in Microsoft Excel, too.

We already had a couple of posts here providing similar functionalities with a comparable approach:

Bluffing Tableau Actions with Microsoft Excel

Highlighting on Excel Dashboards

  Mouse Driven Actions on Excel Dashboards

Today’s post is along the same lines, but focusses on the specific use case described above. It explains how to create this particular Highlight Action in Excel and provides an example workbook for free download.