From the course: Microsoft 365 New Features
Turn data into maps
- [Instructor] When tracking figures for geographical locations, could be countries, states, cities, even zip codes, it's sometimes easier to visualize that data on a map, and that's what you can do here in Excel, create a two dimensional map that displays the figures you've selected in your workbook. All you do is select the content. For example, if you have international sales figures for different countries, you would select those countries and their figures, and when you go up to the insert tab, you'll notice Maps is a dropdown, so we could select it from here, a Filled Map. Just hover over that and you can see down below what you're going to get. If we go over to Recommended Charts, because we selected Geographical Locations and Figures, it's the top recommended chart, right up here. So with it selected, click okay. The very first time you'll see a prompt that data needed to create your map. Chart will be sent to Bing, and you need to accept that, of course, you'll need an internet connection for this to work. Clicking I accept will fill the chart, and you can see the map has changed from a world map to a North American map where we do see shades of this green color, the darkest being the highest values. You can see Canada comes in next and then Mexico down at the bottom. Of course, we can resize this, and work with it like any chart here in Excel. Let's move it around a little bit up next to our data, and you'll notice up at the top, Chart Tools now appears, and we have different chart styles to chose from. As you hover over these, you get a nice look at what that will be like. I'm gonna go with this one here. If we choose a different set of colors, we'll get a better look at this. You can see now the different shades of purples, oranges, et cetera. Just hovering over these will give you a nice little preview of what that's going to look like. Once you've found the color you like, simply select it and it's applied to your map. Now this will also work with different regions like states, for example. When we go to this content down below and select it, where we see a number of different states in the United States of America, and go up to Insert a Map using that data. Let's go to the Recommended Charts again. We're going to see a list of different recommended charts including the 2D map. This time though, the map is simply of the United States excluding the rest of North America. It's gonna use the default colors for this particular workbook. Clicking okay gives us our map which we can move around, we can resize, and of course, if we wanted to, recolor by clicking the change colors. Click in the background to deselect, and when you want to visualize data that's being shown across geographical regions, remember you have these 2D maps here in Excel in Office 365.
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