Importing a custom background image for the chart area from the online source You can toggle between Bing and OneDrive (or between more sources if you have access to them) by clicking on the Bing icon near the search field.
Pro Tip: If you want, you can select an image from OneDrive cloud. In the Bing search field, type the required keyword(s) – we used this combination: Click on the Online... button to bring up the search Window. In this tutorial, we use the third option – Online... – so let’s import the image from the Internet. The second option will be active when we have copied an image and we want to paste it from the Clipboard. We can use the first one if we already have an image saved on our computer. Once we select this radio button, we’ll see three options: Insert an image from File…, Clipboard or from Online... source. From the list visible, we need to select Picture or Texture Fill. Here we need to select and expand Fill options. Double click on the chart area to open the panel with Format Chart Area options. To do this we need to select the chart area. Select a Custom Background Image as the map chart.īased on that, we will define the X and Y coordinates. So we need to add such data by ourselves a bit later. Why do we create a blank scatter plot? Because we don’t have any values to set a correct position for the Regions as the Revenue by itself doesn’t represent any information about the required X and Y coordinates. Select an empty cell to create a blank scatter plot INSERT tab on the ribbon > section Charts > Insert a Scatter Plot After we have done this step, we can add as many KPIs as we need without any problem.Ĭlick on a blank cell outside the data table (otherwise a scatter plot will be built on the values from this table). The good news: we need to do this only once. The more Regions we have in a table, the more preparation work we need to do to create the chart. The creation of a map chart requires a little bit of preparation. We have information on Revenue (column C), Divisions (column A) and geographical Region (column B). The table in the image below has 3 columns that contain information needed for the map chart. Technically, a bubble chart is the same as a scatter plot, but with an additional dimension, so we use this trick to add one extra dimension to our existing scatter plot. Once those steps are done, we’ll convert a scatter plot into a bubble chart. A custom background image is used to visualize an appropriate geographical area (world map, country map or regional map).
We use that to set the required position of all our Regions. Pro Tip: This technique is based on the feature of a scatter plot to show its values according to their X and Y coordinates on a chart area.
The main principle here is building a scatter plot (with a custom background image) that will be converted later into a bubble chart. You can easily apply this technique whatever type of regions, products, divisions or other numeric values you want to show. The small sample data in this tutorial is very simple but it demonstrates the approach we’ll use to build a nice looking interactive map chart. The sample input data that we’ll use to build an interactive map chart