Geospatial Visualization Tool…. Something In A Video Game Or A New Tool In Excel?
Discover Geospatial Patterns with 3D Maps
Data. We love it, we can’t enough of it! But, the challenge can be, how do you decipher it? 3D Maps which, used to be called Power Map, is now available to all Excel 2016 customers. This incredible tool helps you discover patterns in your data and then shows you how these patterns relate to locations, time and geopolitical context. Here is a quick tutorial on what 3D Maps looks like and how to use this awesome tool!
Here’s how you get started:
- Once you are in a spreadsheet within Microsoft Excel that contains data that has geographic properties in a table format or Data Model (for example, rows and columns that have names of cities, states, counties, zip codes, countries/regions, or longitudes and latitudes), click any cell in the table
- Click on the Insert tab
- Select 3D Maps
- (3D Maps uses Bing to geocode your data based on its geographic properties.) After a few seconds, the globe will appear next to the first screen of the Layer Pane
- In the Layer Pane, verify that fields are mapped correctly and click the drop-down arrow of any incorrectly mapped fields to match them to the right geographical properties
- For example, make sure Kansas City is recognized as a City in the drop-down box.
- When 3D Maps plots the data, dots appear on the globe
A few hints:
- Use data in an Excel table or Data Model you created in Excel (https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Create-a-Data-Model-in-Excel-87e7a54c-87dc-488e-9410-5c75dbcb0f7b?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US)
- Or by using Power Pivot
- If the data you want to use in 3D Maps is stored on external servers, you can connect to it from Excel and add it to the Data Model
- 3D Maps doesn’t support hierarchies (groupings of data fields) that you create in the Data Model
For additional tips and help on anything technical always refer to the experts. The most knowledgeable experts I know are, an incredible group of business technology experts at Pendello Solutions. Give the team at Pendello Solutions a call today. They not only know Excel but they know how to get your business running as smoothly as a knife through butter!
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