Golden Software Blog

September has arrived, and fall is nearly here.  For many people fall means football!  With fantasy football drafts upon us, I thought it would be fun to create a map displaying the highest scoring players and NFL teams across the US.  I began by pulling some fantasy football stats from one of the many fantasy league websites to create a spreadsheet with the stats I was interested in.  The fantasydata website has fantasy points assigned to NFL teams based on 2015 pre-season performance as well as historic full season fantasy points for each player.  I was curious to see if the best fantasy point scorers coincided with NFL team fantasy points.

Since the 2014 stats are for individual players and the 2015 pre-season stats are for teams, I decided to show the player data using a symbol map and the NFL team data using a hatch map. Symbol maps apply a color and size gradient to each symbol based on a specified data column. I also applied a color gradient to the hatch map and added labels to the player symbols for a bit more information. 

Today, March 17, much of the world will be going green to celebrate St. Patrick’s day! March 17 marks the anniversary of the death of St. Patrick, who is credited with spreading Christianity to Ireland. Though St. Patrick was not Irish, the holiday named in his honor is now synonymous with Irish culture, or at least Irish food and drink! Here in the United States, we’ll eat corned beef and cabbage, drink Irish beer, and wear green shamrocks with hopes of securing a bit of that luck o’ the Irish! In honor of St. Paddy, I’ve created a map showing where the most Americans live that identify as Irish American, and I’ve compiled some fun facts about the holiday and traditions surrounding it!

Where Irish Americans live; 33.3 million Americans (about 10.5%) identify as Irish American. Click on the map to open a larger image.

This week's new feature series focuses on using text columns for classes in hatch maps and territory maps. In previous versions of MapViewer, classes for hatch maps and territory maps required a numerical data value. If you did not have numerical values to use for your classes, it was necessary to assign a numerical to each class, resulting in tedious data modifications. Now, you can create these classes based on a column of text! Create classes based on salespersons' names, geographical regions, or any other string of text!

Below are step-by-step instructions to create a territory map using this convenient new feature! In this example, I am creating a territory map showing which countries are in which continents. I began with a boundary file defiining the countries and a worksheet containing each country name, which is the PID for each object, and the continent to which it belongs, which will be used for the class column. You can download the files I used and the finished projects here. The boundary file, world_countries.gsb, is simply the WORLD.gsb file from the MapViewer 8 Samples directory that I edited to suit my map!