Localizing information in a map is extremely useful to understand data in the spatial dimension, which is often difficult by other means. Excel offers different options and we are going to show a couple of them. We will start by using data containing geographical coordinates, that is, latitude and longitude. The widespread use of the GPS system nowadays makes it easy to obtain this information. In any case, if this precise information is not available, we will see that the built-in information in Excel will still make it simple to draw maps and show us useful information.
In our first example, we will use data from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Election Data and Science Lab about the 1976 US presidential election. The 1976USpresident.xlsx file contains, among other information, the list of US states and the vote...