How to prepare for your vizMap application – Data

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1 How to put markers on maps
2 What you need
3 Objective
4 Steps
5 What just happened ?
6 What Next

How to put markers on maps

This is part of the Step by Step Guides to get started with some of the more complex topics on this site. The full story on vizMap can be found at Data Driven Mapping Applications

 

What you need

GoogleMapping.xlsm from the Download Complete Projects page

 

Objective

To be able to prepare your data so you can create an application that uses Google Earth or Google Maps, and embeds Google data visualization and twitter activity of your data straight out of Excel.

 

Steps

These kind of applications can be quite complex to set up. Generally speaking there are multiple transactions associated with each spot on the map. This is because you want to visualize (using charts and/or tables inside a pop up infoWindow) quantifiable data  associated with a particular location. That means that we may have to handle data matching and joining as well as mapping. The step by step example is an application which takes concert venues as the locations, with concerts as the transactions, and a look up of artist details to combine into a single dataset to be mapped and visualized. There are plenty of other examples to be found in Data Driven Mapping applications

    Joining Data

  • It is expected that you have at transactional data, locational data which has already been geocoded (probably using How to Geocode addresses using Google Maps) and perhaps other lookup type data, all of which needs to be combined and plotted on either Google Earth or Google Maps. You can do that using the built in joining capability or some other method of your own devising.
  • Go to the Step by Step Transactions Sheet. This contains the list of concerts (Transactions) and looks like this. The next task is combine this with the locations – by matching on Address ID, and artists, by Matching on Artist ID.


 

  • Go to the Artist Master Sheet. Here is a list of artists corresponding to the Artist ID in the transactions. The idea is that we will combine the artist information with the transaction data.


 


 

  • Go to the Step by Step Join sheet. Here you will see the result of joining all this data. This is the data that is going to be used to create a VizMap application. If you already have such data, perhaps joined from a database, you of course can just start here – ignoring the previous steps. Here is the joined data


What just happened ?

Your data is now organized so you can create a vizMap Data Driven Mapping applications

 

What Next

Read more about the detail of how all this works and walk through the source code at Vba to join master and transactional data see some more Step by Step Guides (see below).

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More Step by Step Guides