Microsoft MapPoint is a great product that will allow you to analyze customers on a map. MapPoint is available for US, Canada, and Europe. Episode 416 shows an example of plotting Excel data on a map.
This blog is the video podcast companion to the book, Learn Excel from MrExcel. Download a new two minute video every workday to learn one of the 277 tips from the book!
This blog is the video podcast companion to the book, Learn Excel from MrExcel. Download a new two minute video every workday to learn one of the 277 tips from the book!
Transcript of the video:
Hey, welcome back to the MrExcel netcast, I'm Bill Jelen.
Today I want to talk about a product that works very well with Excel.
This product is called Microsoft MapPoint and if you're doing any kind of an analysis of customers, or anything like that, it's really great to be able to visualize your data spatially on a geographic map.
Microsoft MapPoint is a separate product, it sells at amazon in the $200-300 range, but if you watch for it at ebay, you can usually see it in the $50-60 range.
It's one of those products, that Microsoft often gives away as an incentive to get IT managers to come to a seminar.
And then the IT manager goes out and sells it usually in the $50-100 range.
Great little product, this is MapPoint, you can actually import your Excel data to MapPoint or, what we're going to do today, is start right in Excel and use the MapPoint add-in to map our data.
So I have here a list of customers, I have city, state and zip code, I'm going to click the MapPoint icon and Excel takes a look at the data and says: it looks like you have city, state and zip.
When we click Next, it's going to go through and try and find all of those cities on the map.
And there's a few zip codes, that may be brand new or someone miss keyed, that are unmatched.
So I can either go through and map those, in this case I'm just going to skip all and now Excel adds little push pins to our map.
Now what I can do here, is I can zoom in the store in question.
Here is in Ohio, so if I zoom in on, let's say the Cleveland area, I can start to see where all of our customers are coming from.
This helps me to kind of plan advertising dollars, I understand that I have a few customers coming from Pennsylvania, but for the most part our customers are coming from these various areas.
Now once we have the map activated, we actually have the MapPoint menu here, so I'm going to turn on View, Legend and Overview.
I can now change the pushpins from the default pushpin to a thumbtack, just something different, I'm going to use a red dot, just because I think it shows up a little bit better.
Click OK and again, I can continue to zoom in, zoom in, zoom in… and look right around my store to see where those customers are coming from.
Now this data was just by city, state, and zip code.
If I had actual street address, it would plot right down to the street address level.
And if you have a local store, and you need to do an analysis of where your customers are coming from, MapPoint is a fantastic tool, one of my favorite tools to really kind of liven up my Excel analysis, to drop a little map in there and show the client where the customers are coming from.
Great tool, watch for it at ebay, you can usually get a great deal on it.
Thanks for stopping by, we'll see you next time for another podcast from MrExcel.
Today I want to talk about a product that works very well with Excel.
This product is called Microsoft MapPoint and if you're doing any kind of an analysis of customers, or anything like that, it's really great to be able to visualize your data spatially on a geographic map.
Microsoft MapPoint is a separate product, it sells at amazon in the $200-300 range, but if you watch for it at ebay, you can usually see it in the $50-60 range.
It's one of those products, that Microsoft often gives away as an incentive to get IT managers to come to a seminar.
And then the IT manager goes out and sells it usually in the $50-100 range.
Great little product, this is MapPoint, you can actually import your Excel data to MapPoint or, what we're going to do today, is start right in Excel and use the MapPoint add-in to map our data.
So I have here a list of customers, I have city, state and zip code, I'm going to click the MapPoint icon and Excel takes a look at the data and says: it looks like you have city, state and zip.
When we click Next, it's going to go through and try and find all of those cities on the map.
And there's a few zip codes, that may be brand new or someone miss keyed, that are unmatched.
So I can either go through and map those, in this case I'm just going to skip all and now Excel adds little push pins to our map.
Now what I can do here, is I can zoom in the store in question.
Here is in Ohio, so if I zoom in on, let's say the Cleveland area, I can start to see where all of our customers are coming from.
This helps me to kind of plan advertising dollars, I understand that I have a few customers coming from Pennsylvania, but for the most part our customers are coming from these various areas.
Now once we have the map activated, we actually have the MapPoint menu here, so I'm going to turn on View, Legend and Overview.
I can now change the pushpins from the default pushpin to a thumbtack, just something different, I'm going to use a red dot, just because I think it shows up a little bit better.
Click OK and again, I can continue to zoom in, zoom in, zoom in… and look right around my store to see where those customers are coming from.
Now this data was just by city, state, and zip code.
If I had actual street address, it would plot right down to the street address level.
And if you have a local store, and you need to do an analysis of where your customers are coming from, MapPoint is a fantastic tool, one of my favorite tools to really kind of liven up my Excel analysis, to drop a little map in there and show the client where the customers are coming from.
Great tool, watch for it at ebay, you can usually get a great deal on it.
Thanks for stopping by, we'll see you next time for another podcast from MrExcel.
