Why create an interactive map?

1. Interactive maps make it exceptionally easy to see data – immediately! There’s no scrolling through irrelevant spreadsheet rows or columns. Visualized location data allows you to focus on a particular area, immediately.
2. The geographic terrain covered by Interactive maps doesn’t go out of date – basemaps, usually supplied by Google, are updated regularly and you can choose what type of basemap best reveals your particular data.
3. Your data can be easily segmented and tailored to suit the needs of particular business activities: marketing, sales, distribution, etc. What’s the advantage of this? No department is overwhelmed with information, but given manageable, insightful and relevant data most suited to its activities.
4. While using an interactive map, you can endlessly filter data, to get clean, clear insights. Where do you get the most sales in a particular state? Where is the highest concentration of customers? What’s the distance between your warehouse/supply centers and individual customers?
5. Interactive maps engage the eyes and the mind, and are therefore more effective in imparting key information to those who interact with them.

Now let’s make one….

If you’ve already signed up for an eSpatial account, you are ready create an interactive map.

We’ll just cover a simple interactive map here. For other types of map (report, heat or radius maps), explore our how to guides.

First things first

Ensure that you have location data on your Excel document that Google Maps can recognize. This can come in the form of a country, a city, an address or even a zip code. Sometimes there will be errors in the data upload, but these can be quickly corrected.

Select Save As in Excel and save your existing document as a CSV (Comma delimited) file.

Next, log into eSpatial or take a few seconds to sign up for a free account.

When you’re in eSpatial

Once in the eSpatial homepage, click upload data on the top of the page:

On the next screen, click Add Files:

Select your saved .csv file and open it. It will now appear in eSpatial:

Click next. The following page helps you organize your upload. We’ve added red arrows to explain the features:

The red arrows above refer to the following:

1. Tells you the location field(s) found in your .csv file. In this case, five fields are being used to determine location. One is the minimum number of fields required. You can remove fields by clicking on the X. You can preview which fields are being used to locate data or add more fields by clicking View Data Change Fields.
2. All addresses are in – leave this blank if your fields are not limited to a specific location. Otherwise, you can use a country, state name, county, etc. You can also use this box to fill in a location not mentioned in your original spreadsheet: for instance, if all the location data is contained within one particular state, e.g., Kentucky.
3. Slider bar – allows you to manage the mapping accuracy of your data, from Country level (low accuracy) to Number level (high accuracy).
4. Click and move slider left or right to decide accuracy level.

If you’re happy with your choices, click Next to move to the next page:

Here, you’ll get a preview of the fields that will be included in your map data.

Move the slider (1) back and forth to view all available fields. Click the green tick (2) to include/exclude fields.

Click Complete Now and you will come to this page:

Use the above page to label the name of your dataset and to include a description of what it is.

Next, click Finish, which will finish the upload process. The next screen will show you a progress bar and how much time is left to finish the upload:

Once the progress bar has reached a 100% and if there are no errors, simply click Map My Data, as below. If you have data errors, you can learn how to resolve these by clicking here.

All done now – and, if you’ve followed the procedures above, your map should look something like this: