I am new to MapPoint and am trying to create a dat....

I am new to MapPoint and am trying to create a data map with the counties in my state shaded to show the number of visits made to each county. I keep getting maps shaded on the sum of the ID numbers in the spreadsheet.

I'm not sure where you are going wrong. If you have a simple spreadsheet with one row for each county which includes the number of visits to this county, and you make this the data field that MapPoint uses as the data field, it should work. If you have multiple rows per county, with varying numbers of visits per row, it won't work.