How to transfer polygon data into freeform shapes in Microsoft Excel
If you are a regular reader or even subscribed to this blog, you will not be surprised to hear that I am working on a new challenge regarding maps in Microsoft Excel.
We had a lot of articles already on how to create Choropleth Maps in Microsoft Excel. The new project is about using maps in Excel again, but with a different type of visualization.
Since I am just starting out on this challenge, I can’t provide more details yet.
Having said that, for the preparation of the new project, I had to work with geographical polygon data. Now, what’s this?
“A polygon is […] a plane figure that is bounded by a finite chain of straight line segments closing in a loop to form a closed chain or circuit.” (source: Wikipedia).
In the context of geographical visualization, a polygon represents a region (e.g. country) on a map. Such a polygon consists of a series of geographical points: pairs of latitude and longitude in a defined order (path). If you draw an outline through these points in the given order, you get a shape forming the boundary of this region.
And this was my challenge: transfer geographical polygon data into freeform shapes in Microsoft Excel. I am not sure, but I thought maybe some of you might be interested, so I decided to share my solution.
Today’s post first shows how to plot polygon data on standard Excel XY Scatter charts and then describes my solution to transfer the data into freeform shapes. As always, the article provides a link to download the Excel workbook for free.