I have been playing around with Geo Charts using Google Spreadsheets and thought I would post an easy straightforward tutorial for anyone who has not tried it out yet. Start by logging onto your Google account and clicking Drive on the Toolbar. Next click spreadsheet.
After this paste your data into columns A and B. Column A must hold the locations and column B must hold the value. These locations can be countries or states. For my example I am showing the number of NFL draft prospects for each state.
After this select columns A and B then click Insert > Chart.
Once you click chart select Charts then Map. Also make sure the Geo Chart regions choice is selected. Then click Insert.
After clicking insert you will see the box graph show up. Click on the arrow in the upper right hand corner then click on Advanced Edit.
Almost done. Once you get to this edit area change the region to match your list of locations then choose your color scale for min, mid, max, and no values.
Click update and you are done! Very simple visualization. Also has a global map and maps for each continent.
I read this blog tutorial and thought it was an easy and convenient way to display data in a geographical form. There is a lot of data that can be presented on a map such as this. Number of recruits from each state is a good example as John as shown above, but there are many different kinds of data that would work just as well. For example I found data on number of DUI arrests per state. I thought this data would work great with this program.
ReplyDeleteThe tutorial was simple enough to follow. There was only one problem that I ran into. At first the program did not recognize that I was trying to display this data on a map of the USA. I followed the steps to convert the map from world to US, but the data did not follow. I tried a few different approaches to solve this problem. Eventually I deleted my data and re-inserted it. Somehow this fixed the problem and the map looked great. As for the results, California had by far the greatest number of DUI arrests. They had about 125,000 more the state with the second most DUI arrests, Texas. Alabama came in 23rd with about 15,000 DUI arrests.
I decided to try the other type of geo map available in this program: a map with dots at a location with the size of the dots as an indicator of the value. I found earthquake data. I thought this would work great with this type of map. I imported data of recent earthquake location and magnitude in the world. This created a great looking map. It looked very similar to maps that are on display on weather and geological websites.
This program was simple and effective. I enjoyed working with it and would recommend it to others.