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


Group Highlighted Regions by Color

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

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
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
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.
 
 

Postcode Finder for Australia, Interactive

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.

Select Additions -> Highlight Regions -> Zip (Post) Codes -> Australia Postcodes
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.
Highlight Postcode in Australia Dialog
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 Australis
Postcode Finder for Australia