What is a good resource for making choropleth maps using excel data?

Question

I would like to make a choropleth map of Malaysian regions, colour-coding them by population density.

Is there a place where I can find templates of such a map?

Answer 1

i think you dont need any template to make thematic map in excel. if you have problem with color, you can check out colorbrewer2 for some aspect about colors.

making thematic maps with excel, you can watch this video here and here - Creating Simple Maps with Microsoft Excel. beside this Microsoft MapPoint may help you about creating maps in excel.

Microsoft MapPoint is a product that you can use to integrate maps into Office documents, including Excel worksheets. MapPoint shares much of the functionality of the Microsoft Office System, such as copying and pasting.

• Create a map with MapPoint and Excel, here

nevertheless you want template, you check out this link:

1. Choropleth Map USA by Congressional Districts, here
2. Pop Soda Coke Choropleth Map, here
3. Choropleth Map Template, here

in addition to this:

• MapCite: Web Mapping and Excel Location Intelligence Applications, MapCite's Excel AddIn - here

• StatPlanet: Create fully customizable, feature rich interactive maps & graphs and publish them online.The award-winning StatPlanet is a free download, here.

i hope it helps you...

Answer 2

You can try the public beta of 'Esri Maps for Office'

"Esri Maps for Office is an add-in for Microsoft Office that brings mapping capabilities into Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint. With Esri Maps for Office, you can easily create a geospatial view of your organization's data by creating an interactive map that includes data from Excel and ArcGIS services—all without leaving the Excel environment. From Excel, you can publish your Excel data to ArcGIS Online, push maps you've created to PowerPoint, or copy maps as images that can be inserted anywhere that paste functionality is supported. Esri Maps for Office brings mapping into PowerPoint by allowing you to include maps from Excel or maps from ArcGIS Online as slides within any PowerPoint presentation"

It comes with basic templates to get you started.

http://resourcesbeta.arcgis.com/en/communities/esri-maps-for-office/

More info http://resourcesbeta.arcgis.com/en/esri-maps-office/index.html#//029300000005000000 \

Answer 3

If you have Excel, but don't want to purchase another software package (although both Mappoint and ArcGIS are good investments), you can map directly in Excel with a little creativity and VBA.

Basically you'll need to import your geography shapes (or create your own), build a table that references the value you want to express and some VBA to connect the two. The first one takes a few minutes to set-up, but after that its extremely simple to manage.

Check out the tutorials at:

tushar-mehta

Clearly & Simply