Global Data Visualization Using Excel

Tonight's tip comes by way of Above the Law's Legal Technology blog . The new versions of Excel come with enhanced data visualization features, including 3D Maps which allows you to plot data on map. See the example shown in the screen grabs below, which come from Excel 2016. Begin with a spreadsheet which includes addresses and related information, in this example baseball stadiums and their seating capacities. See Fig. 1. After the data is formatted as a table, you simply need to select it and go to Insert . . . 3D Map . . . Add Selected Data to 3D Map. See Fig. 2. What is in effect an entirely new design application opens up which allows you to layer the data associated with the addresses on top of the map. In Fig. 3 color concentric circles show which locations have the largest number of seats for baseball fans. Note that zoomed out, where there are more than two sources of data at locations near one another, the data points get piled together - for example, Yankee Stadium and the Mets' Citi Field appear as one unit. But as shown in Fig. 4, it's possible to zoom in and show much greater detail.