Tag: geographical visualization

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.

(more…)

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.

A Set of Choropleth Map Templates for Microsoft Excel

The dashboard of Lithuania at a glance used a county based map of Lithuania to visualize the geographical distribution of the population by color intensity: the darker the color, the higher the value.

Very often, this type of geographical visualization is called thematic map, heat map or statistical map. The less known, but correct expression however is Choropleth Map.

The idea of how to create Choropleth Maps with Microsoft Excel – as brilliant as it is simple – is the brainchild of Tushar Mehta, Microsoft Excel MVP. I simply “borrowed” his idea and code and put it to effective use on the Lithuanian Dashboard.

Many readers of Clearly and Simply have been interested in this technique, but unfortunately I was not allowed to provide an unlocked workbook of the Lithuanian Census Dashboard (see comments on Lithuania at a glance). That’s why I thought it might be a good idea to write this post including a couple of templates for Choropleth Maps with Microsoft Excel for free download.

(more…)