I would like to create and superimpose various polygons of different shapes, sizes, and colours/shades and incorporate them on a map with data taken from an Excel database.

Could you please help.

This is tricky.. I would suggest starting with the Spatial Data Importer developer sample code ( http://www.mp2kmag.com/news.asp?NewsID=%09%0920 ), but it works with GIS files (mif/mid and shape).

The techniques can be adopted to work draw data from Excel or Access, but if you're not familiar with GIS, this may not be best route to tackle this.. in that case you might go directly to the Help file and check out the Add* methods.