Category: Heat Map

UK Post Codes Districts – ZeeMaps

Posted on | by Brita Austin | Leave a Comment on UK Post Codes Districts – ZeeMaps

UK Post Codes are designated by two alphanumeric codes. The first one or two letters indicate a postcode area, followed by one or two digits signifying a district within that area. Following this is a space and then a number denoting a sector within the district, and finally two letters which are allocated to streets or sides of a street. While originally designed for mail sorting and delivery, UK Post Codes, as postal codes around the world, have become important geographical boundaries for varying kinds of analysis, e.g., where to put a new store. The reason is that the population within the same post code district or area usually share characteristics like income, education, family structure and so forth.

Due to the rich demographic utility of post code district and areas, having the ability to highlight post code districts or post code areas in different colors on a map can be important aid in performing analysis like which areas have a concentration of certain value, e.g., car dealers.

ZeeMaps has supported the highlighting of UK Post Code areas for a while, and recently we’ve added the capability to highlight UK Post Code districts as well. This will allow our users to perform finer grained analysis with post codes.

You can highlight UK Post Code districts or areas in ZeeMaps in one of two ways:

  1. Use the Additions -> Highlight Post codes -> menu item on your map
  2. Upload a spreadsheet with UK Post Code districts.

Highlight Post Code districts a few at a time

To highlight a few post code districts at a time, use the Additions -> Highlight Post Codes menu item on the map.

Adding UK post codes using highlight postcode areas

Next, choose the UK tab at the top. Then, enter the Post Code or Area that you wish to have added to the map. We added CR0 for Croydon. Also, see that as you start typing the Post Code that a drop-down list will appear to assist in your selection.

UK Post Code Drop down list example

Notice, you are able to add more than one at a time. Finally, choose the boundary and fill color, along with opacity. Last, click Submit.

Highlight Post Code – Croydon Example Output

UK Post Codes through Spreadsheet Upload

If you have a large number of Post Code districts to highlight, then highlighting them one at a time can become tedious. Instead, you can use our spreadsheet upload to highlight the post code area.

One such example is Heat Maps – a common map type used to represent the magnitude of a phenomenon as color in two dimensions. In other words, it highlights the hot spots, or data clusters.

For this example we used the UK Post Codes Districts spreadsheet, attached below. In the first column of the spreadsheet, we specify the post code area or district, in the second column we have a numeric value, e.g., the number of car dealers in the given post code district. We add a third column that specifies a color based on the value in the second column. For details on how to do this easily, please see our post on the Excel IF Function. Color value is based on the number of dealers (column B). Therefore, red represents higher numbers while green represents the lowest.

UK Post Codes Excel example

Upload the data

To upload the data, we added the UK Post Codes spreadsheet to our map via Additions > Upload (Copy – Paste) Spreadsheet.

UK Post Codes Upload Data Prompt
Upload Data Prompt

To begin, we selected UK Post Code District from the drop-down.

Upload data example

Next, we chose United Kingdom as Default country.

Finally, notice our selections – Dealers selected for Name, Color selected for Category, and Post Code selected for Post Code. These are default selections. Last, click Submit.

View our example map below.

UK Postal Areas Map

The process for creating the UK Postal Areas Map is the same as above, except we are mapping postal areas instead of post codes.

View our example map below.

Use Our Spreadsheets to Create Your Own Map

Download our UK Post Codes or UK Postal Areas spreadsheets below to create your own map. It’s easy!

1: Create your map

2: Share on social

3: Tag ZeeMaps! #ZeeMaps #WeMapYourLists

UK Post Code DataDownload
UK Postal Areas DataDownload

IF Function in Excel – IFS Function in ZeeMaps

Posted on | by Brita Austin | 1 Comment on IF Function in Excel – IFS Function in ZeeMaps

A type of IF function in Excel is the IFS function in which you can input multiple conditions to determine cell values. The function is checked from left to right for the multiple conditions, and the value set for the cell is determined by the first condition that is met. IFS is a much easier way of testing for multiple conditions instead of nesting multiple IF functions.

This statement is extremely helpful when we want to make one field value dependent on another. For example, if the score is => 80, then the Grade is B; if the score is =>90, then Grade is A.

In this post we will show you how to assign different colors to pins or highlighted regions when you upload a spreadsheet. We will use a spreadsheet that has zip codes in the US with a column for number of dealers in that zip code. The sample spreadsheet is attached to the bottom of this post and has just two columns, ‘zip code’ and ‘dealers’. We’ll add a third column – ‘colors’.

Find the Color Name

First, for this task we need to take a look at the color options in ZeeMaps, which are listed here. All ZeeMaps users have access to 32 colors and users on our Enterprise plan have access to 72 colors. To use the extended color palette, please see our blog post.

Color Name for Excel IF Function

For our IF Function, we will need to assign different color values based on values in a given column of our spreadsheet, e.g., number of dealers, grades, etc. For this purpose, note the Color Name in the color list. Use this as the color value in your expression.

If Function Excel Color Choices
IF Function in Excel Color Choice Example

How to write the Excel IF Function

Generally, the syntax for the Excel IFS function is:

=IFS([Something is True1, Value if True1,Something is True2,Value if True2,Something is True3,Value if True3)

The Excel IF Function allows you to test up to 127 different conditions.

Note that the conditions need to be entered in the correct order, and can be very difficult to build, test and update if you have entered a large number of conditions.

The Expression – Excel IF Function

We entered the following Excel IF Function expression for our example below. Since our spreadsheet column B contains the number of dealers, we’ll enter an IF Function expression in cell C2 as follows:

=IFS(B2 <= 5, “Green”, B2 <= 10, “Light Yellow”, B2 <= 15, “Yellow”, B2 <= 20, “Red”)

If Function Excel Expression
Excel IF Function Spreadsheet Example

Then, we copy the formula to the rest of the column C and voila, we have colors for each of the zip codes! You can find our example spreadsheet at the end of this tutorial

A look at our IF Function Map

For more info on IF Function Excel visit Microsoft’s detailed instructions for some helpful tips.

Example Data Download

Click the download button below to view our example data excel spreadsheet

IF Function Example Data –Download