Amendment #5 to Choropleth Maps with Excel: a Map Template for the United States by Counties

In a comment on Multicolored Choropleth Maps with Excel Dave Hammer wrote

“… I'm doing some mapping right now by County and Congressional District. Some folks at Wikipedia have supplied some excellent .svg maps with proper labels […] but I'm hitting a roadblock with Excel. […] They're easily imported into Excel as an enhanced metafile and then ‘ungrouped’ to create an excellent map – but all the data associated with the shapes is lost during this process. […]”

Actually there is a way of converting .svg files (scalable vector graphics) into Microsoft Excel without losing the data associated to the shapes. The next post will describe a detailed how-to tutorial, but I thought you might be interested to see the results in a sneak preview. This post offers free downloads of choropleth maps of the United States by county, in the classic and the multicolored version.

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Amendment #4 to Choropleth Maps with Excel: Map Templates for Romania and England

It turned out to be choropleth map summer here on Clearly and Simply. Originally I planned to have only two posts on choropleth maps with Microsoft Excel here and here.

Surprisingly the templates were very well received by the readers: I have noticed an unusual high amount of page views and downloads. Some readers obviously took the templates like a duck to water, produced their own maps and were kind enough to allow me to share the workbooks here (see Paulo’s map of Portugal and Gabriel’s map of Brazil).

Jeff Weir, member of the month in July 2009 over at Chandoo's blog, wrote a thorough, inspiring and funny guest post called We can’t cure cancer, but we can cure this medicare chart [Chart Busters]. Jeff obviously doesn’t like Choropleth Maps very much (and mentions a couple of good reasons in his text), but he was kind enough to include a link to my article Choropleth Maps with Excel. Many thanks, Jeff.

Furthermore, other bloggers recently published new templates:

Fabrice Rimlinger (of Sparklines for XL fame) posted a map template of Romania and Phil Quinn offered a map of England by ceremonial counties for free download.

Many thanks to Fabrice and Phil.

Many thanks again go also to Tushar Mehta who made all these choropleth map templates possible by sharing his brilliant idea here.

I have to admit that I am not using choropleth maps very often for my own work. However, because of the great response I received from all of you, I decided to stick to this topic a little longer: I am planning to publish another 2 or 3 posts on choropleth maps during the next weeks, before we will continue with new ideas, dashboards and visualizations here on Clearly and Simply in September.

Stay tuned.

Amendment #3 to Choropleth Maps with Excel: a Map Template for France

At the risk of boring you: here is another choropleth map template, this time France by departments (without départements d’outre-mer and territoires d’outre-mer) :

Download Choropleth Map France (Microsoft Excel 2003 zipped, 113.4K)

This one is for you, Fabrice. Consider it as my humble acknowledgement for your brilliant work on Sparklines for XL. I know you are working in Romania for the time being, but I thought having a choropleth map of your own country might come in handy some later day.

Amendment #2 to Choropleth Maps with Excel: a Map Template for Brazil including an alternative approach

Once more a Choropleth Map Template arrived (see also Paulo’s Portugal Map).

This time Gabriel Eiras Villa kindly contributed a choropleth map of Brazil:

 Download Choropleth Map Brazil (Microsoft Excel 2003, 129.5K)

But Gabriel has even much more to offer and share. He had a brilliant idea of how to simplify Tushar Mehta's approach:

Gabriel suggested to use one color (e.g. black) and simply change the fill color transparencies of the shapes according to the values of the regions instead of defining a color gradient table and assigning different shades of grey.

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Amendment #1 to Choropleth Maps with Excel: a Map Template for Portugal

The set of choropleth map templates published in my recent post was well received by the readers of Clearly and Simply.

Paulo, one of my few but faithful readers from Portugal sent me an email including a choropleth map of Portugal by districts. He was kind enough to allow me to publish it here and share it with you:

Download Choropleth Map Portugal (Microsoft Excel 2003, 196.5K)

Muito obrigado, Paulo.