MVP #43: A Cool Practical Use Of Power Map in Excel 2013

Power Map is one of the cool new tools in Excel 2013. It's more of a Business Intelligence (BI) tool. It helps you visualize data by plotting them on a map. And to explain a practical way of using it. I have gotten a table of the coordinates of the major towns in Nigeria (courtesy Blexxonmak Communications). It's not very accurate but that's the best publicly available data I could get, and I have included a randomly generated column of corresponding population using =RANDBETWEEN(500000,2000000).

You can download the Excel file here.

So how do we visualize this data on a Map (using Power Map)?
It's amazingly easy.

You select the entire table, goto Insert Menu, click on Map and Launch Power Map.

You'll get a new window that looks like the one below.

The two most important parts are:

In the rightmost pane (shown in the immediate image above), tick Latitude and Longitude. And at the bottom of that pane, link them appropriately (select Latitude for Latitude and Longitude for Longitude).

Click on Next. Tick Population and Town. 

And you'll get a beautiful map like the one below.

The populations are showing as data bars at the very location of each town. And you can zoom.

Placing the mouse pointer on any of the data bar will show you the full information for that data point.

Also let's turn on Map Labels so we can see the states and towns as they would show on a conventional map. Click on Map Labels on the menu bar.

You'll get something this cool.

And that's how easy it is to use Power Map in Excel 2013.

And to add more fun to this, we can change the way the map looks. Just head to Themes on the Menu bar. And try out the other themes.

Can you try guessing what theme I used for the following?

A.

B.

C.

I'll be waiting for your answer...