Do More With Maps

Free online mapping services open up a world of possibilities for your creative, practical and professional projects. Nik Rawlinson grabs his passport.

- Nik Rawlinson

You might not think of mapping as an everyday computing task, but the technology is becoming ubiquitous. Google, Apple and Microsoft each have their own mobile platforms, which draw in geographical data to help us navigate from A to B, geotag our photos and pull in weather reports from the web.

Those basic functions, however, represent only a fraction of the potential on hand. We literally have the world in our pockets – and there are a lot of things we can do with it. The possibilities include creating your own customised maps; navigating and exploring more effectively; and even promoting your business through Street View.

Embed a map in Excel

If you’re putting together a report or presentation that relies on geographical data – such as country populations or vote share in different cities – you can make that data more accessible and visually interesting by plotting it on a map, rather than a boring old graph.

You can do this directly within Excel, but to make it work you have to format your data in precisely the right way. The top row of your data table must contain column headers, to define the data. Below this, the first column must contain only location names, with all other columns being entirely numeric. You can see a sample table above right, showing cities in column A and a statistic of your choice in column B. (We’ve chosen cars, but don’t hold us to the accuracy of the data.)