Creating a map

You can create interactive geographic maps in the Charts section that visualize your geographic datasets data.

When you choose “Filled Map” for your new chart type, Spider Impact creates a map with sample data. This sample data is the same as every other chart type, and it allows you to explore the functionality without needing to hook it up to data first.

Map levels

Maps show data from datasets that have geographic fields. The sample data shown by default is made-up numbers for every country. When you click “Map Levels” you can choose which levels of the geographic hierarchy you want to show on your map. Here we’re seeing 2D Earth broken into countries because those are the two levels that are turned on.

This is what it looks like when you turn on the Continent level. Our starting view is now the 2D Earth view broken into continents because those are the two highest levels that are turned on.

Next, we’ll turn on the 3D Earth level. You can’t have both 2D and 3D Earth, so the 2D Earth level automatically turns off. We can now see a 3D globe that slowly rotates on its own until you interact with it.

When you go to the Charts View tab, the map automatically resizes to fit available space. You can hover the mouse over a region to see its value in a tooltip.

When you click on a region, you’ll see a zooming animation and then that region in more detail. This Country level is the lowest map level we have enabled, so we can’t drill down any further. You can click the Back button to zoom out to the world map.

Map data

To show your real data on a map you need to first choose Set Data Source in the Data menu.

The data we’re choosing here is what numbers and colors you want to show up for each map region. In this example we’re going to choose the Customers dataset and “Number of Records” for the field. That means our chart numbers and colors are going to be the number of customers in each region.

Next we need to choose a geography field in the Customers dataset.

In this example we’ll choose the Postal Code field.

The map is now colored by the number of customers in each region.

When we change to the Charts View tab and hover over California, we can see that we have 5,804 customers there.

Clicking on California zooms to the state level and now colors the postal codes. This example shows how postal codes don’t always completely cover a state, especially in rural areas.

Starting view

The Starting View for maps is Auto by default. That means it starts showing the lowest map region that contains all of the data. In the customers example above, the view automatically started at the United States because all of the records in the Customers dataset were in the US.

You can choose a specific region to start on, though. Here we’re choosing the US state of New York as the starting view.

Now when we first view the chart we’ll see all of the postal codes in New York. This map also has the Country level turned on, however, so there’s a Back button to take us out to the country level.

Map colors

You can change the map’s colors by choosing “Filled Map Colors” in the Other menu.

By default maps use a light yellow to dark purple gradient broken into 6 segments.

You can change the color scheme and number of segments, however, as well as manually set the thresholds between color segments.

Here we’re showing the number of customers in an 11-segment blue color scheme.

Maps on dashboards

Maps, like all types of charts, work great on dashboards. Here we’re showing our customer map with speedometers and a dataset table widget.

Clicking on either a map region or the dataset table widget will apply a dataset filter for that region to the entire dataset.