Yesterday, Microsoft released a preview of Power Map; a geo-spatial mapping Excel add-in, formerly know as GeoFlow. It’s a pretty cool add-in that allows you to plot data based on geographic identifiers (longitude, latitude, country name, town names, postal codes, etc), and show it on a 3D or 2D map. It works with tabular data sets, whether they be from and Excel table, database or Power Pivot.
The other cool thing is that, once you get it right, you can actually produce a video that can be shared with non-Excel users! I’ve uploaded one of those to YouTube so you can check it out.
This video shows the wind speeds of hurricane Sandy as it travelled through the Caribbean to it’s eventual landfall on the USA’s east coast. I used a heat map to show the speed (the redder it gets the faster), and played it over time so you can trace the path.
Pretty cool stuff!
If you have Excel 2013 Pro Plus, you can download the preview here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=38395