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.
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
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.
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.
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.
We’ve added the ability to highlight and find postcodes in Australia. You can highlight postcodes, or find postcodes that are within a specific area on the map.
“Postcodes are used in Australia to sort and send mail to the correct address. All postcodes in Australia have four digits and are placed at the end of the address. Australian postcodes are managed by Australia Post.” from the Wikipedia article on postcodes in Australia.
Highlight Postcodes in Australia
To highlight one more Postcodes in Australia, use the Additions -> Highlight Regions -> Zip (Post) Codes -> Australia Postcodes menu item on your map. Menu item to highlight postcodes
In the resulting dialog, enter one or more four digit postcodes separated by commas or spaces. Specify the color for the highlighted area and the boundary and hit Submit. Dialog to highlight a postcode in Australia
For example, here’s a map with postcodes 0872 and 6440 highlighted.
Postcode Finder for Australia
To lookup postcodes that are in a specific area in Australia, use the Additions -> Highlight Regions to define your region. Then, use the menu View -> Lookup Zip (Post) codes menu item and click on your highlighted region. That should show you a list of all the postcodes that fall in the given region. Postcode Finder for Australia
ZIP codes are a system of postal codes used by the United States Postal Service. ZeeMaps supports Zip Code Lookup, using the View -> Zip Code Lookup menu item on your map.
Zip Code Lookup for Texas
For example, suppose you want to lookup all Zip codes for the state of Texas. Highlight the state of Texas, using the Additions -> Highlight Regions -> States on your map.
Then, once the state of Texas has been highlighted, select the menu item View -> Zip Code Lookup, and click an the highlighted Texas region. You’ll get a list of all Zip Codes in Texas. Zip Code Lookup for Texas
The same feature can be used to lookup Zip Codes of a particular city, county, or an arbitrary building. You can click on a building to get the Zip Code of the building instead of the area. You are not limited to using pre-defined regions for doing a zip code lookup. Since ZeeMaps allows you to define arbitrary areas like circles, rectangles, polygons and hand-drawn, you can lookup zip codes for any region on the map.
Unlike the US Postal Service’s Zip Code Lookup service, with ZeeMaps you can easily lookup zip codes for an entire region, instead of having to do it one zip code at a time.
When you click on an highlighted region, the lookup is done for the entire region. If you want to find the zip code for a point within an highlighted region, first click outside the region and then move the zip code locator to the point inside the highlighted region.
