Introduction to Excel GeoFlow (Beta 1)

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I have been playing around for a couple of weeks with the beta release of Excel GeoFlow and I  have got very mixed feelings about the product. No, I am not trying to be the Grinch in this Christmas season and I must say that I sure do like the direction in which Microsoft and this product is going – just that it is not even half as ready as I would have expected (but to be fair to them, it is just the beta 1 release). That said, there are a couple of features that I am really excited about and I thought of jotting down a quick introduction to GeoFlow for those who are interested.

1) How to get the beta release of GeoFlow
If you would like to try GeoFlow, send a mail to geoflowbetarequest@microsoft.com and wait for the team to respond. You must have Excel 2013 for GeoFlow to work.

2) Current Limitations
– Related tables are not supported in this release.All the data should be in one table.
– Backend data changes are not reflected in the visualization in this release and this will mean deleting and recreating the visualizations.
– No Undo/Redo is supported in this release.
– No way to slice and dice data within the visualization
– No drill down functionalities from a higher level (say, states) to a lower level (say, counties) which is there in tools like Power View.

3) Create a basic GeoFlow report
GeoFlow requires your data to have some geographical fields in it. It can be in a variety of formats including latitude and longitude, street address, city, zipcode, state, country, etc. Be aware that you will need internet connection for the geocoding to take place. For the purpose of this demo, I have got the population and personal income data by year of all the counties in the United States. Follow the steps below to create a basic GeoFlow report:-

a) After installing GeoFlow, you should now be able to see the 3D Map button in the Insert tab. Click on any of the cell within the data table and then select the 3D Map button within the Insert tab. Click on the Explore in 3D option as shown in the image below.

b) Choose the geographical field based on which you need the map. In my case, it is the StateName field. Click on Map It button to proceed.

c) Click on the Population field to see the states visualized by this measure.

By default, you have got the Column chart visualization (which can be clustered or stacked if a category is present). This can be changed to a bubble map or a heat map visualization also.

4) Navigating the 3D Map
Navigating the 3D map can be tricky so it is useful to know all the navigation features. To use a mouse to navigate in the GeoFlow 3D environment, do any of the following:
·         Double click rapidly on any portion in the globe to zoom closer to it.
·         Use the scroll wheel on your mouse to zoom in and zoom out.
·         Click and drag the globe in any direction to pan without changing the pitch.
·         Hold the Alt key, and then click and drag to change the pitch.
·         If you lose your point of focus, zoom all the way out with the scroll wheel to reset the globe and view. To use the Keyboard to navigate in the GeoFlow 3-D environment, do any of the following:
·         Tap the arrow keys up, down, left and right to pan and spin the globe.
·         Hold the Alt key and then tap the left and right arrow keys to orbit the current target, or the up and down arrow keys to increase and decrease the camera pitch.
·         Tap the plus (+) and minus (-) keys to zoom in and out.

5) Interesting Features
There are quite some interesting features in GeoFlow and these are some of the main ones in my opinion:-

a) Handles multiple geographical levels:- We can add multiple geographical levels to GeoFlow. To add the counties (AreaName field) to our basic report, click on the Edit button in the Layer Manager as shown below.

Then select the AreaName field and map it to the County in Geography section. Then click on Map It button.

Now you should see the map visualized by counties. It might take some time for all the data to be processed on the map and it depends on the number of rows that you have. When the processing is done, you should see the message as Finished in the green bar below the map.

You can easily toggle back to the states by selecting the StateName radio button in the Map by section. However, as I mentioned before, drill downs are not possible (as far as I know in this release). Vote to up this request in Connect by clicking here.

b) Visualizing Data over time:- We can visualize the data over time if we have a date  or time field. In my dataset, I have the year but this is not enough as GeoFlow requires a date or time field. So I had to make a new filed called DateYr which converts the year to a date field by adding 1/1/ before every year. Vote here to up this request to have the time play axis use any level of the time dimension. Now in GeoFlow, drag and drop the DateYr field to the Time section. Now you will get an additional section for time settings which has values like Time Accumulation, Instant and Persist the last.

You can also see the time play axis on the bottom. Click on play and you can see the data changing over time. c) Adding Annotations and Textboxes:- This is definitely one of my favourite features. We can now add an annotation to a particular data-point by right clicking on it and then selecting the Add annotation option.

Similarly, you can add a textbox also. The only difference between them is that an annotation is bound to a data point while the textbox is more like a sticky note on the screen. The textbox stays at the same position even when the map is panned or zoomed. d) Find a Location:- The find a location feature is pretty handy in case you have a lot of data points and want to directly zoom to a particular location.

e) Creating and Saving Tours:- I have obviously saved the most exciting feature for the last. Now you can create tours by clicking on the New Tour button and then including the scenes in the tour by selecting the Capture Scene button.

Scenes will transition automatically and effects are automatically applied. A scene is auto-saved when you capture a new scene. If you want to change a scene, for example if you want the scene to show a different angle or a different time subset, select the scene, make the changes and then click on Save Scene, Once you have created a tour, you can play it by selecting the Play Tour button. I have posted a video of a sample tour that I created.