GISLounge has a great post called How To Make a Map From Open Data Using a Spreadsheet, which is actually using Google Sheets specifically. Earlier today, I also tripped across a post highlighting an excellent visualization of how to choose beer based on ABV and IBU values. That post lead me to the original data set, which included the cities in which each of those beers are brewed, so for fun I thought I'd marry the two posts and play around with mapping that data set.
The glue is an add-on for Google Sheets called Geosheets, and it's really pretty slick. Follow the first post from GISLounge if you want to make your own, but here's my end result:
From that page you should be able to get to my Google Sheet to see how it all gets put together.
But what I really wanted to do is note a couple of quirks with Geosheets.
- Somewhere along the line as I was putting this together, I ended up with a second map, thus using 2 of my free 5 maps,
but I can't find that 2nd map anywhere on the Geosheets site or in Google Sheets in order to delete it!
- Not as big a concern, but there's also nowhere I can find that describes what makes up a "daily request".
- I really liked the ability to have Geosheets auto-assign colours based on the values in a given column, but I didn't see any way to tweak that feature. For instance, I thought the yellow was a bit too light, but it seems to be a take-it or leave-it proposition.
- The biggest issue is that I don't think it mapped all the locations! For instance, I know there are three breweries in Anchorage, AK in my spreadsheet, but only one appears to have made it on to the map. So now I suspect others are missing, but who knows? In the sidebar within Google Sheets there is a warning that suggests maybe some locations couldn't be found, but a) nothing's actually shown with that warning - so either something's missing from the display, or why bother showing the warning, and b) if some of my Anchorage data IS missing, why?
The contents of the cells are the same... Looking at the map again, there are supposed to be 512 different beers shown, and my eye says they're not all there. I don't see anything on the Geosheets site that suggests there's a limit to the number of points that can be mapped :-/
So, a pretty darn neat tool that's maybe not quite ready for prime-time, but definitely worth tucking away for when you want to whip out a quick map based on the data you have in a spreadsheet.
