Graphically Charting Geographic Data

Kauai has students from all over the country enrolled in classes at his school. He would like to build a graphical chart of the US states, charting our enrollments by state and color code the states based on the number of enrollments from that state.

In Excel 97 and Excel 2000 there is a built-in "mapping" feature that you can use to create the desired map. The feature was removed in Excel 2002, and made into a separate product called Microsoft MapPoint. If you have Excel 97 or Excel 2000, you can learn how to use the feature by referring to this page in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=147637

If you are using a later version of Excel, then you won't be able to create the desired map with Excel; you will need to get an additional program, such as Microsoft MapPoint (http://www.microsoft.com/mappoint) or SPSS (http://www.spss.com). (Creating the desired map with SPSS is very easy to do.)

If you want something a little more complex than a simple color graphic, you could use a free program to map the data, such as Google Earth (http://earth.google.com). You can export your student's data from Excel to a simple CSV file, and then import it into Google Earth so that the individual student locations can be superimposed over a satellite map.