One of the most fascinating aspect of Business Intelligence is the power to picture data in an easy to understand way. I personally like maps a lot, not the google or bing type with lots of circular points which give very low added value to the information, but the Choropleth maps. Those shaped areas with shaded colors intended to convey an idea at the first sight.
Choropleth maps are mostly used with regional data but they can picture any kind of information on any kind of shape, the idea behind is very simple: you have a SVG image (a vectorial one), with one id for each closed area. Remember those days when we were kids and used the coloring book to paint on pre-designed images?
That’s it. Then you load your data and assign to each id a numeric value to get a colored area with a increasing intensity of color.
This is exactly what the Synoptic panel does.
The Synoptic panel itself doesn’t paint the picture, you need to have a coded SVG to use with it. And creating a coded SVG is not difficult, you may use any SVG editor, or just go to http://synoptic.design which is an extremely useful web build by the same people who did the custom visual.
I must thank @DanielePerilli for his very good job and his continuous support. He was very responsive and helped me through building my first map.
So in about an hour and a half here we have two maps with polls data from the Spanish elections in 2011. I downloaded the CSV from http://www.electionresources.org/es/data/index_es.html#PROVINCIAS and used the Synoptic panel to create two maps where I filtered respectively the votes obtained by PP and PSOE.
No rocket science, anybody can do that. Just a little caveat, it’s not very intuitive: if you want to have different shades of color, you should drag a field to the “Saturation Values” box in the visualization settings. And if you want to display names on the map, you need to enable “Category Labels” in the format tab of visualization settings. That took me more than 5 minutes to figure out.
Anyway, go download it, create your own map or use those available in the gallery and happy coloring!