A radius map showing UK office locations and their reach

Radius map: Upload circles on a map from spreadsheets

Posted on January 31, 2020 | by zeemaps | 1 Comment

We thought it was time to add the function to upload a radius map. ZeeMaps allows you to upload spreadsheets with pins, or with highlighted geographical areas like US zip codes or counties. Now you can highlight circles on the map with different radii, using spreadsheet uploads.

To upload a spreadsheet of data as circles, add a column called ‘Radius’ to your spreadsheet. Specify the radius in miles or kilometers for each of the rows. On rows where you do not have a radius specified, you can define a default radius. Therefore, if you want all your circles to be of the same radius, you do not need to create a radius column – just specify a default radius.

How to upload a spreadsheet to create a radius map

To get started uploading a spreadsheet with circle markers, you can do one of two things:

Select the ‘Additions’ > ‘Add (Upload) Multiple Markers’ menu item on your map, or
Click the ‘Map My Spreadsheet’ button.

You will be presented with a dialog to pick a file to upload. Along with the file, there is an option to specify what kind of markers you would like to add. Make sure you select the option that says ‘Circles’, as below.

This image shows the upload data page and how to upload as circles. — Select the option to upload circles on a map

After you have selected a file and hit submit, the next dialog will give you the option to select your radius column, choose the default radius, and select whether the radius values are in miles or kilometers. Even if you are not using the default radius, and have specified radius values for each of your spreadsheet rows, make sure you check the appropriate box for miles or kilometers, depending on how your radius values are specified.

This image shows the default radius option and also the circle radius column. — Circle radius column and default radius

Just like any other spreadsheet upload, the circle markers can have different colors and additional information in them that will be visible once you click on the circle.

The benefits of circle markers

Circle markers can be helpful if you have multiple service persons and jobs spread throughout a geographical area. They can help you to quickly understand which service person to assign to which job, depending on distances.

Group Highlighted Regions by Color

Posted on February 24, 2017 | by zeemaps | Leave a Comment

ZeeMaps allows you to highlight geographical areas, e.g., zip codes, counties, cities, states, or geometrical areas like circles, rectangles on your map. You can use such highlighted areas to mark out sales territories, or show service areas on a map. Often, your “region” will comprise of several smaller “geographical” areas. For example, a pizza delivery service might consist of an area composed of several zip codes. Or, a sales territory map might divide the country into several regions comprising of several states each.

Group Highlighted Regions

We’ve added a capability to “group” highlighted areas by color. Use the View > Group Regions menu to combine the borders of your highlighted areas. Once you do this, boundaries will be removed from all contiguous highlighted areas of the same color.

combine highlighted regions — Menu item to combine regions

While the highlighted areas are grouped, you cannot add or make changes to existing areas. To do that, un-group the areas, make the changes, and then group the areas again.
Grouping and un-grouping of regions requires an active Enterprise plan subscription.
For example, here’s a map that has several US Zip Codes highlighted grouped together. Following it is a the same map without the grouped highlighted regions.

Interactive Map with several highlighted zip codes grouped together by color

Interactive Map with highlighted zip codes and other areas

Las Vegas Zip Codes Spreadsheet Uploaded to a Map

Posted on December 16, 2016 | by zeemaps | Leave a Comment

ZeeMaps now allows you to highlight US Zip Code areas on a map by uploading a spreadsheet with address and color information. Previously we supported highlighting regions only few at a time. As an example, in this blog post, we’ll show you how to highlight all the Las Vegas zip codes on a map.

Las Vegas Zip Codes Spreadsheet

We collected all the the las vegas zip codes and put them in a spreadsheet. A small sample of the spreadsheet is shown below:
City, State, Zip Code, Color
Las Vegas, NV, 89101, red
Las Vegas, NV, 89111, blue
Las Vegas, NV, 89102, green
Las Vegas, NV, 89103, red
Las Vegas, NV, 89106, blue
Las Vegas, NV, 89107, green
Las Vegas, NV, 89109, red
Las Vegas, NV, 89128, blue
The complete spreadsheet of the Las Vegas zip codes can be downloaded from: Las Vegas Zip Codes.
We’ve added the “color” column to our table to indicate which color we’d like to use to highlight a specific zip code. You can modify the color later once the map has been created. ZeeMaps supports 31 different colors that can be used for spreadsheet uploads. For a complete list of supported colors, see the menu item Map -> Legend on your map.

Upload Las Vegas Zip Codes Spreadsheet to a Map

Create a map and then use the menu item Additions -> Add (Upload) Multiple Markers. This will result in a dialog that asks for the spreadsheet file:

Upload Spreadsheet to Map for Las Vegas Zip Codes

In this dialog, as shown in the figure above, you can select the option to upload the data as pins or as highlighted areas for the zip codes. Since we want to create a map with zip codes highlighted, we’ll chose the option of “US Zip Code Regions”.
The spreadsheet can be in Excel file format or a CSV file. You can also copy-and-paste data from a table, or attach a spreadsheet maintained on a Google Drive. The advantage of using a spreadsheet on a Google Drive is that you can have the map be automatically updated based on changes to the spreadsheet.
Once you submit the data, a dialog will ask for confirmation of the column mappings to the field values. Make sure your columns are assigned to the appropriate fields, otherwise the data may not be mapped correctly.

Confirm column mappings for Las Vegas zip codes upload

Las Vegas Zip Codes Map

After you confirm the column mappings, the highlighting of zip code areas will start. It may take a few minutes for large files. You’ll get an email report when the upload is finished. Refresh your map and it should show you the highlighted areas. Our interactive map of Las Vegas zip codes is embedded below.

Click on a highlighted zip code to see more information determined from the additional columns of your spreadsheet. In the information bubble, you can click on the title or name to get an edit dialog to make changes to that specific entry, including the ability to change the color.
When highlighting regions through spreadsheet uploads, the normal region limits apply: 5 for Basic (free) plan, 10 for Professional, 25 for Professional Publisher. In addition, the Enterprise plan is restricted to 5,000 highlighted regions through spreadsheet uploads. If you need more, please contact us for special provisioning.

Trip Planner in ZeeMaps for multi-point routes

Posted on August 12, 2016 | by zeemaps | 8 Comments

Trip Planner Overview

ZeeMaps can used as a trip planner to plan your routes visiting multiple points marked on your map. Routes, an ordered list of destinations, can be created on any map, even maps not your own. Some highlights of trip planning with ZeeMaps routes are:

The ZeeMaps trip planner can optionally optimize your route for distance or time.
Routes are associated with your account for each map, so you’ll need to sign-in to create a route.
The trip planner allows you to print your routes, with a map showing the overall route and each stop labelled and listed on the print page.
Routes are available when you access the map from your Smart Phone, so you can easily get directions to your next stop from where you are.

Using the ZeeMaps Trip Planner

To create a new route on a map, use the menu item Additions -> Route. This will show you a dialog containing the route. For example, here’s a route on our Used Computer Stores map for a few stores in San Jose and Santa Clara, California.

Start clicking on pins on the map to add to the route. In the route dialog, you can select the route to be either automatically optimized for Distance or for Time. If not, you can leave it to be manual. If the route is in manual mode, you can drag-and-drop the destinations in the route to re-order your route. With a route dialog, you can do the following:

List All: list all the routes that you have defined on this map
Print: get a map print-out of your route, with each stop marked on the map and listed
Reset: clear your current changes
Show: show the routes between the destinations
Save As: Save your route for future reference
Close: dismiss the route dialog

Routes in Smart Phone

After you’ve defined your routes on a map, visit the map from your Smart Phone. To see the routes, click on the menu item and click on the Routes option. This will bring up a list of your routes, so you can click on the one that you want. Once you are on the route, you can click on any destination to get directions to that destination.

Heat Map Visualization in ZeeMaps

Posted on August 10, 2016 | by zeemaps | 1 Comment

Heat Map Overview

Heat map, a density visualization technique, shows areas of high and low concentration on a map. While, a point map with 10’s of thousands of locations can become cluttered, a heat map visualization of the same data can quickly show areas of dense population.

For example, if you plot the locations of all your customers as a heat map, you can quickly see where there are pockets of low or high number of customers.

ZeeMaps provides support for a these maps in both the interactive and print versions. Currently, we look at the frequency, or number of points at a given location, to determine the density. Over time we’ll extend this to allow for the density value to be determined through one of the the marker fields.
Notice, you can combine this feature with the Zip Code Finder tool in ZeeMaps. Finally, a great way to quickly determine the zip codes with high density of points on a map!

Example Map

Here’s an example of a heat map of locations of all the Used Computer Stores in the US. First, with the map, one can quickly see that Boston and New York are the most dense areas. While, other major cities like San Francisco, Dallas, etc., have some notable presence as well.

Now, click on the icon at the top right of the map. Notice, the display will change to the regular clustered point map.

We can also get an image of the same map, using the menu item Print or Share -> PDF/PNG Image. In the resulting dialog, we check the option for “Heat Map” for the pin style.

Heat Map of Used Computer Stores in the US — Map of Used Computer Stores in the US

Setting a Heat Map in ZeeMaps

Turn on the this feature for your map. First, go to the settings page (menu Map -> Settings). Second, click on the Map Display tab. Third, check the box for “Enable Heat Map” and hit Save Changes. Last, go back to the map to view the change. Finally, there will be a small icon at the top right of the map (see interactive map above). You can click on that icon to toggle the display from a heat to a regular point map.

Enable Heat Map in ZeeMaps — Enable in ZeeMaps

Map Title
Description
Admin Password		Again
Starting Location