I am trying to complete what I think should be a simple task, but I’m finding it incredibly difficult because I can’t find software to do what I want. I’m hoping someone will have a suggestion.
Here’s the deal: I’m doing a very basic audit for a client that has a presence in about 70 countries around the world. The data that I’m looking at falls into three basic categories, with each country occupying only one category. I want to do a simple graphical representation of that data using a map. I’d like to have a map of say, South America, and have the capability of coloring the countries in South America different colors depending on which data set they fall into. In other words, green for Brazil, yellow for Peru, red for Argentina, something like that.
Does anyone know of a software package that will do this? Am I being dense? I have a small budget for this, so I could spend as much as $200 for the software, but obviously free and downloadable would be better.
I did something similar to this (except it was the states and provinces of the US and Canada). I just found an online map with the outlines of the states and provinces and then opened it up in my Windows Paint program to add the colors. The program has a feature that lets you fill in an area with one color.
Microsoft’s Visio program comes with map stencils that will probably do the job for you. Unfortunately, I can’t say if the Standard ~$90 edition includes the stencils or if it only comes in the ~$250 Professional edition which I have on my work computer.
Oh, missed the Windows 98 caveat… It looks like Visio 2003 doesn’t run on it. Maybe you can find an older version of it on EBay or something, or maybe someone more helpful will come along…
Thank you, thank you, thank you Little Nemo. Turns out my problem was one part my being dense, one part the restrictions of using the computers at work.
I had thought about doing exactly what you said, but then forgot about it at work because we don’t have any kind of paint program there. Now that I’m on my home machine, this should be a snap.