How to Create a Geographic Map

Geographic Map (also known as a choropleth map) is a heatmap that uses geographical boundaries like regions, states, and countries. It is used to highlight geographical differences and similarities in data.

This article describes how to use a table that contains countries or another geographic category, such as state, region, or county, and a comparative statistic, such as population.

To create a geographic map that shades the color of each location in the map in proportion to data values.

Requirements

Geographic map visualization requires that the data has been combined into categories or entities arranged in a table with two columns:

Column 1: a list of geographic entities. The entities may be countries, continents, states, regions, or zip codes, see How to Access an Exhaustive List of Geographic Entities Available for Geographic Maps.

Column 2: a data value for each geographic entity.

There are many ways to specify a geographic entity:

Countries may be specified by name or a three-letter ISO code.
US states can be referred to by their two-letter code; Australian states can be referred to by their acronym.
Zipcodes and postcodes can be used for Australia, the UK, and the USA.
USA regions can be used (i.e. Northeast, Midwest, South, West).
SA4 Areas of Australia can be used.

You can also use one of Displayr's built-in tools to gross your more granular data into one of the supported entities, see How to Automatically Combine Categories - By Geography.

Examples of data that work with the Geographic Map include:

1. A summary table that contains a state or other geographic question in the Rows drop-down menu, which will allow you to map the number of people/proportion of people in each geographic area from your sample. Alternatively, a summary table of a Binary - Multi question or Numeric - Multi question, where there is one row (variable) for each geographic region that you want to include in your map.

2. A crosstab setup that has a geographic question in the Rows and a numeric variable in the columns. Alternatively, you could have a SUMMARY table of a Binary - Multi question or Numeric - Multi question, where there is one row (variable) for each geographic region that you want to include in your map.

3. A raw data table where you have one row per geographic area and no tabulation, where aggregation or calculations are needed on the data. When this is the case, you can create a raw data table using the Table icon > Paste or Enter Table to display the raw data in a table form. From the object inspector, go to Data > Data Source > Paste or type data.

Method

Create an output table on the Page, as described in Requirements.
From the toolbar, go to Visualization > Geographic Maps > Geographic Map.
From the object inspector, go to Data > Data Source > Data and select the output on the page that contains the geographic data. You can find the name of the output by selecting the output, and from the object inspector, General > General > Name.