MapForums

I'm using MapPoint 2009 European Edition, and I'm trying to map our revenues by location of customer. I have them all in a spreadsheet, and want to import them using the wizard.
In most cases, by 'location' I mean country. So far so good. However, we have a number of clients in the Channel Islands, and I want to show these as if they were in a separate country from the UK. Same goes for Isle of Man. So the data will look something like:

Belgium £50,000
Channel Islands £75,000
France £100,000
Isle of Man £20,000
UK £500,000

I created a custom territory called Channel Islands and then attached Jersey and Guernsey to it. However, when you import data, you have to map the location column to EITHER a country/region OR a territory. You can't treat a territory as a pseudo country, or so it would seem.

Is there a way around this? Suggestions appreciated.

Shortest Route:

Draw a shape the color you want and send behind roads
(Make a note that you did this, though).

Mike Mattys
www.mattysconsulting.com

Sorry to be dim, but I don't see what you mean. Are you saying that by drawing a shape you can somehow define a new country? I didn't think that was possible.

What I meant was that the longer route would be to define territories
in terms of postal codes so that you can get the colors right amongst
the sales totals by using the data mapping wizard and shaded areas.

It would be far easier, in my opinion, to draw shapes of the correct color
for the dollar amount where required and be done with it.

Mike Mattys
Mattys Consulting - Custom Programming

Also when there's so much difference in the areas of the geographic units you want to map, I've found that proportionate circles are a better way of conveying mapped data than shaded areas. ie circles whose areas are proportionate to the £ figure.

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David
UK mapping and map analysis services at www.broomanalysis.plus.com

Thank you. Yes, In fact I am using variable-sized pie charts to show revenue by product in each region, and it works fine. The size of the pie illustrates the relative size of total revenue in the region, and the slices divide it up by product.
The problem remains, though, that I can't treat the Channel Islands as a separate 'country' from the rest of the UK, even though there are business reasons to do so thanks to the tax regime there. You can't mix and match countries and territories when importing data.
The only option I can see is to create a territory for the Channel Islands, a territory for the rest of the UK, and a territory corresponding to each other country in the world. Then I can consistently use territories to map the data. However, as we sell all over the world, this is just too painful an exercise.

I don’t think drawing territories would help much, given the limited functionality in MapPoint for linking data with territories. A possibility would be to consistently geocode your customer data (assigning region/country to each one), and then to do the aggregation of sales data in MS-Access (or even Excel). Then for plotting the data you have a centroid latitude longitude for each region/country for plotting the symbols (eg pie charts) in MapPoint.

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David
UK mapping and map analysis services at www.broomanalysis.plus.com