Creating Map Charts In Mac Numbers

Sometimes it is useful to have bar charts where each bar is placed at a spot on a map or graphic. You can do that in Numbers, even though there is no special chart type for it. You just need to get creative.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's get creative in Numbers and create a Math Chart. 
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Let's create a chart in Numbers that looks like this. No, this isn't some new functionality in Numbers. This is something that you could have always done for awhile. You just have to be creative in order to make this. So to show you how it's done let's start fresh. I'm going to take this Table here that has the populations for each continent and copy and paste that into a new document. Now if we wanted to create a chart from this it's pretty easy. All you need to do is select the Table here. Go to Chart, select the type of chart, let's just do a 2D chart like that and you could see what I get. But what if I want to place each one of these bars on a map?
I can't separate these or place them in specific locations so it doesn't really appear to be anyway to do it. But you actually can if you get creative. 
Let's get rid of that and instead of creating something for all of these rows I'm just going to select the first row there. I'm going to create a chart just for that. So now you could see here I've got the population just for North America. Now let's go and alter this to get rid of a lot of the extra stuff here. So under Chart we're going to get rid of the Legend. I'm going to go to Axis and I"m going to get rid of just about everything I could find. I'm going to get rid of the Minimum Value. I'm going to take the grid lines and get rid of those. I'm going to go to the X Axis here and get rid of that line as well. There's no good way to get rid of this. If I select it I could then change the value labels to Custom and simply put nothing in the format. Now I've got this bar here that's all by itself.
Let's shrink it down and make it as narrow as possible and let's change the height. Now one of the things we want to do that's really key here is we want to change the maximum value. So let's go to the value Y Axis here and instead of the scale being maximum automatic let's set it to something just above the largest value here. So Asia has almost 5 billion people so I'll set it to that which sets North America up to be about that height there. Then we've got the label here. We can maybe make that a little nicer, make it bold. Let's make it white but with a shadow.  So there will be a shadow underneath it. We don't need an offset for the shadow there. We can increase the opacity of it like that. We can make any other changes we want to this as well. I won't worry about the color and all that. You can change that to whatever color that you want. 
Now we have something for North America. How do we get the other five rows here. Well, I'm going to copy this and paste it or you can Option Drag to make a duplicate of it. If I go then for the second copy to Series I could change the value here from population of North America to, I'll select it and delete it, the population of South America. Now we want to change the label as well. So we'll go to Axis here and select the X Axis. You could see label references. We'll get rid of that and we'll change it to this one. Now that's South America. Let's continue to do that with each one. I'm going to Option Drag North America away from here. Then for Series I'm going to take the value and have it be the population of Europe. I'm going to take the Axis X label reference and make that Europe. Let's Option Drag to create the fourth one. Then I'll change the value here to the population of Asia. Change the X Axis label reference to Asia. Then let's Option Drag for a fifth one and make the change there and the label. I'll Option Drag one last one and I'll change this to the population of Australia and the label for Australia. 
Now we've got each one of these showing it's proper bar height. Remember because we set the maximum for each one of these in value Y here to5 billion, slightly bigger than Asia's population, they will all match. So now all we need is a map. Fortunately we do have a map right here. I go to Shape and I Search for map. I can find a couple maps here. I'll take this one. I'll put it here. Let's do something with it before we actually move it into position. I'm going to go to Format, Shapes & Lines, Break Apart. That breaks it all apart into different things so I can get rid of Antartica and some extra things here that will make it a little easier to manage. I can now select it all and then I can Group it or I could Unite it into one shape again. Now we can stick it behind these. You can see it's going to be in front so I can go to Arrange and to Back. I could set the color to something a little bit better so change the Fill to something a little bit darker, brighter, however we want to do it. Any color that you want.
Now that we've got that we could move these bars to where we want them like that. See Australia's bar isn't really even registering here. If you were to bring this higher you could see it register. So what we might want to do is increase the height here of all of these. So let's go to Arrange. We can see the height is 84. What if we did a 100. That would be just enough to show a little bit for Australia. So what we want to do for each one of these is to do a 100. A hundred high. We can position these where we want. It's a little hard to read the labels there because everything except the continents are just white there. So we can make this look a little bit better by putting another shape behind. In Basic I'll do a rounded rectangle there. I'll have this cover a lot of the area and I'll Arrange and send this to the Back like that. Then we can set this color to something a little bit better. However you want it to look. Now you can continue to arrange things and get things looking like you want. 
There are certain things that you could easily change. If I wanted to select all of these I can Shift Click and select all of these here and then I could go and under Chart I could select Chart colors and go to a different color like that. So that's pretty easy to do. You could also go to the Font here and change that for all of them. But if you want to do something like change the color of each one you're going to have to go to each one here. Like select North America, go in and change North America. So you have to change six. 
So now you've got a map that looks like this with these and the best part of this is this is still all tied to the table here. So if we made a mistake, for instance, and this number was wrong I could adjust it and you could see how it still fits. Or I can change these numbers to say gross domestic product or some health measurement or all sorts of different things. So you can use the setup to represent lots of different things. You don't have to recreate it all from scratch next time. You could just Copy and Paste this. Change maybe the colors of the map, the colors of the background. Change these numbers here. Maybe give it a nice title across the top and use it like you want. You could also select these and change the chart type from 2D column to 3D column and then you end up with this. You'll probably have to do a little more work here with the width of each one of these which is kind of a nice arrangement here. It would probably work a little bit better if you did it with that first one and got it looking exactly like you wanted before you duplicated it and created the other five. 
Now as you can imagine you can use this for all sorts of other things. You can have any kind of map or some sort of graphic and then place different bars or different things in different sections and have the numbers that are in the table shown visually in some sort of really nice looking effect like this. 
I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 2 Responses to “Creating Map Charts In Mac Numbers”

nick

3 years ago

hey Gary, I see under the Format>Shapes and Lines it has Unite Shapes, which you use here. However in the Arrange box on the right hand side of the screen, it has Group. Is there a difference between the two commands? thx

Gary Rosenzweig

nick: Yes. Group will take the two shapes and lock them together so they move together. But they are still two separate shapes. You can even set a different color for each one. Unite will merge the two shapes to create a new shape combining the lines. You then have a single shape. Play with each one to see how they work.

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Creating Map Charts In Mac Numbers

Comments: 2 Responses to “Creating Map Charts In Mac Numbers”

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