Clearly and Simply

Optimized Choropleth Maps in Microsoft Excel

How to create optimized Choropleth Maps in Excel with a higher resolution and without distortions using Excel 365

Inspired by an idea of my internet friend and highly esteemed colleague Leonid Koyfman, the post US Choropleth Map by County per State – a 4th Option described and provided an Excel workbook with a Choropleth Map of the United States including a second map showing a magnified view of one selected state.

The code and technique itself worked fine.

However, there was one major disadvantage: during the process of creating the map in Excel, the shapes were slightly distorted. The zoomed map of one state still looked good for e.g. Texas or California, but definitely not for smaller states like Rhode Island or Connecticut.

Today’s post provides a solution to overcome this issue: a way to create a Choropleth Map in Excel without distortions, displaying all counties accurately, no matter at which zoom level. As always, an example workbook is provided for free download.

Dynamic Icons in Microsoft Excel Cell Ranges

Spice up your interactive Excel Dashboards with dynamically changing Icons, Pictures or Charts

The Excel workbooks which came with two of my recently published posts showed dynamically changing flag icons inside of a dynamic table on an Excel dashboard.

Showcase for Table Slicers on Excel Dashboards

My 2 Cents on the COVID-19 Dashboard by JHU.

The tables visualized data per country and the flag icons next to the country names were automatically adjusted if the user filtered the data, changed the sort criterion or scrolled within the table.

This week I received some feedback on these workbooks and readers asked, if I could explain this in more detail. No sweat: todays post provides a step-by-step explanation of the technique and the according workbooks for free download.

My 2 Cents on the COVID-19 Dashboard by JHU

For what it’s worth: a few remarks on the currently extremely popular COVID-19 Dashboard provided by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University (JHU)

When the Corona pandemic started, I was tempted to build and publish a dashboard about the spread of COVID-19, too. But then I decided not to. Not only because much brighter people than me beat me to it, but also because the topic is very sensitive. People suffer and people die. Not the type of data I want to analyze and visualize. Hence, I stayed out, stayed home and wrote a few articles about something else (see my recent posts).

Today I changed my mind. I still don’t want to create a comprehensive COVID-19 dashboard, but I would like to add my 2 cents to the definitely most popular Corona Data Visualization: the COVID-19 Dashboard provided by the Johns Hopkins University:

This afternoon, I read that this dashboard is currently clicked 1.2 billion (!) times a day. 

First things first: it is a great dashboard providing the most important numbers at a glance and various options to drill down into the details. I am very impressed by its features, how quickly this visualization was made available and how often the underlying data is updated. My congratulations to the data science team of the JHU.

Having said that, I also see a few weaknesses and today’s post will discuss two of them.

Choropleth Maps of Italy in Excel

A Collection of Choropleth or Filled Maps of Italy in Microsoft Excel

Heads-up: today’s post is dedicated to my friends and readers in Italy. You will certainly only be interested in this article, if you are working in Italy and/or with Italian data.

If not, you can easily skip today’s post. It does not include any new ideas, it is only new wine in old wineskins: a collection of Choropleth Map techniques (already published here), applied to maps of Italy for different levels of detail.

ClearlyandSimply is a special interest blog with only very few readers. Most of them are located in the United States, but when I am looking at the web traffic coming from Europe, Italy is always ranked among the top 3, way ahead of e.g. France or Spain.

I do not exactly know why. I have a hunch, though:

Back in 2014 and 2015, I helped my friend Marco Nicolucci creating Tableau visualizations of the history of the Serie A (Italian football, or calcio as you say) and the Rugby World Cup for La Gazetta dello Sport. As of today, both visualizations are still available on the Datamania site of La Gazetta:

• Serie A, l'era dei 3 punti
• Rugby World Cup, la storia in numeri

If the visualizations should no longer be available on La Gazetta dello Sport, you can also find copies on my Tableau Public Profile.

So, maybe the publications on La Gazetta dello Sport drove some traffic from Italy my way.

Also, maybe my Italian internet friend and highly esteemed colleague Roberto Mensa spread the word about my blog. You probably know Roberto. If not, you definitely missed something. Roberto is the guru for data visualization with Microsoft Excel, not only in Italy, but throughout Europe. Together with Krisztina Szabó and Gábor Madács from Hungary, he is running a website called E90E50. I highly recommend to check out the E90E50charts - Excel Charts Gallery, you will find truly amazing work there, all for free download.

Well, wherever the traffic comes from, this post is for my Italian readers:

A collection of 6 templates for creating Choropleth Maps of Italy in Microsoft Excel. All of them are ready to use. Simply download the workbook(s) you like, replace the dummies by your own data and you are good to go.

Heat Maps with Individual Color Scales in Excel

How to create Heat Maps in Microsoft Excel using individual Color Scales to support the analytical insights into the distribution of the data

In his brilliant guest post Analytical Color Scales for Heat Maps, Ron Whale explained, how color scales can efficiently support the process of analyzing data.

Applying different, thoroughly designed color schemes can help to gain deeper insights into the distribution of data, to identify outliers, to focus on special points of interest, to find similar groupings and more.

In a nutshell: switching between color scales of a Choropleth or Heat Map helps you to understand your data.

Whilst Ron was developing his great palette of color schemes for using them on a Choropleth Map, they are equally helpful for a much simpler visualization technique: a Heat Map of a table (or range) of numbers.

Microsoft Excel does provide a built-in feature to create a Heat Map on a range of numbers: Conditional Formatting. However, this is limited regarding the configuration of the color scales and it does not provide the option to easily switch between color schemes for supporting the data analysis process.

Today’s post provides a technique to overcome this shortcoming of Excel: a VBA-based solution to easily apply any given color scale to an Excel range with only two mouse clicks. As always, the post comes with the workbook for free download.