Measure Distance & Google Maps Routing

ZeeMaps allows you to measure the distance and Google Maps routing between two points:

  1. You can connect two pins with a straight line or route, and show the distance in Kilometers or Miles.
  2. Click on a pin to get its information bubble, then click on Directions (From Here or To Here). This allows you to specify the start or end destination by entering an address or selecting a location on the map. Then, a directions request to Google Maps gives you turn-by-turn directions including the distance and duration.

We’ve added a Distance Ruler to ZeeMaps that allows you to quickly get the distance between any two locations on the map. The resulting distance is specified both for a straight line distance and a route distance.

Use the menu item View -> Distance Ruler on your map to get the distance ruler.

Then, from the prompt, click on the ‘Start’ button in the ruler to start measuring.

measure distance google maps prompt image

Click anywhere on the map and drag your mouse to the destination. You receive the distance between those two points.

The image shows the distance between two points in our Monsters of America Map

For another set of two points, click anywhere else on the map and repeat the drag to the next location.

Once you click on the Start button:

The map stops responding to normal clicks and drags for zooming and panning.

To temporarily re-enable these features while you are measuring distances, e.g., to re-position the map, you can hit the ‘Pause’ button on the distance ruler.

Measure Distance with Google Maps Routing

Click on your map pin. Then choose from Directions From Here or To Here.

For more info on the Jersey Devil, check out this article: Jersey Devil – Fact or Fiction?

This allows you to specify the start or destination, by entering an address or selecting a location on the map.

Then, a directions request to Google Maps will give you turn-by-turn directions including the distance and duration.

Measure Distance with Google Maps Routing

Try out our new tool and let us know how it works out for you!

Pinned Circles on the Map

With its combination of highlighting geometric regions and pins on a map, ZeeMaps provides a powerful tool to analyze service areas or sales territories. Now a new feature – pinned circles on the map – allows for increased capabilities.

Sometimes, users want to convey the service area around a service provider by showing a radius circle around a marker. For example, if Jim works within 10 miles of his Lexington office, there will be a circle 10 miles around his map marker. Then, if Mary works 25 miles from her office, there will be a corresponding 25-mile circle around her marker on the map.

As shown above, such maps tend to get cluttered very quickly as circles start overlapping, and cluttering can often render the map useless.

Pinned Circles – New ZeeMap Feature

We’ve added a feature called “Pinned Circles” that allows you to put circles around map markers. However, unlike regular circles they only show when the corresponding map marker is clicked upon. Then, as with information bubble windows, only one circle will be showing on the map at a given time. This greatly reduces the clutter and allows you to quickly see the service area for each service provider individually.

 Pinned Circle example map

To add pinned circles to your map follow the instructions for uploading circles on a map, but this time choose “Pinned Circles” for the Marker Type option.

choosing pinned circles in upload data

You may need to refresh the page to see your changes take effect. Now you should be able to click on the map pins and see the circle based on the radius provided.

To change a radius entry, click on the map pin then click the pop-up name (here it is Jim). From there, you will choose the details page and enter the new radius. Click Submit and Close.

change radius for map pinned circles

Try Our Example Map for Yourself!

Use our pinned circles example data below or try using your own dataset

Map Marker Images as Icons

ZeeMaps allows you to change the pin icons on your map by color. For example, you can replace all the red pins with an image icon of your choosing. The Voting Location map shown below is an example of this.

Map Marker Images as Icons

Sometimes, however, you might like to show the picture or image stored with a marker as the icon for that marker.

For example, if you have a set of sales people marked on a map you can show a picture of each person for their pin. And with our Chupacabra & Other American Monsters Map, you can view images of the monsters as your map marker icons!

Map Marker Images as Icons

How to Display Images as Marker Icons

ZeeMaps allows you to add an image with each marker.

To dispay images as marker icons, go to the Map -> Settings page and then select the ‘Marker Display’ tab. Next, check the box for ‘Use marker picture as icon when available’ and hit Save Changes above the list. Once you enable this setting, any marker that has a picture associated with it will have that picture shown instead of the regular ‘teardrop’ pin.

Pixabay is a good resource site, where you can snag some picture icons, as well as map ideas and images!

Change the Picture Icon Size

If you need to adjust the size of the picture icons, you can use the menu item Map -> Marker Icons on your map. For a given colored pin, you can set the size in terms of width x height. The default is 20 x 34 pixels.

So, if your map markers started off as red map pins, then you would alter the size for that color, as shown below.

Image Marker Sizing

For example, as mentioned above, we recently created the Chupacabra monster map with ZeeMaps. For each monster found in the US, we’ve added a picture of that monster as its pin. With the setting of ‘Use marker picture as icons’ it’s easy to see at a glance where each monster is found.

Create Your Own Pictures as Icons Map

1: Create your map

2: Share on social

3: Tag ZeeMaps #ZeeMaps #WeMapYourLists


We cannot wait to see what you create!


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

Zip Code Look up & Other Region Search Tools

In this blog, we show you how to perform a quick zip code look up in your map, if you have pins representing the zip codes and areas highlighted for your search geography. Start by adding pins and highlighted area(s) on your map.

There are many useful applications for looking up points that fall within a zip code or region.

For instance, you could look up all your customers within a zip code or other boundary outline. Alternatively, you could look up how many service stations are in your state or zip code. In the end, it comes down selecting and summarizing map points inside of a boundary. Essentially, any point feature and any boundary will work. You can even draw your own!

In an earlier post, we had detailed the ZeeMaps search feature that allows you to perform extensive searches for the pins on your map.

The detailed search dialog allows you to search for points based on field values. As well as, combine them with distance or geographical search. The geographical search includes searching within a highlighted region.

We’ve now added the ability to quickly do a look up search within a region by simply right-clicking on the region.

To start the search, just right-click on any highlighted region (boundary) and the display will limit itself to the points that fall within regions of the same color. To reset the search, right-click on the region again.

Once you have started the search, you can get a list of points that match your search by doing a Map -> Save as CSV.

For example, we are going to work with look up for a sales territory map that shows the sales territory zip code for three salespersons of a company. Each sales person covers roughly 2-3 zip codes. Each sales persons territory highlighted in different color.

As an example, we are going to work with a look up sales territory map that shows sales zip codes for three salespersons of a company. Each sales person covers roughly 2-3 zip codes.

We’ve added a list of potential customers to this map, with different customer types in different colors. For example, customers not contacted are red, while those contacted are green.

To get an overview of all the customers that have already signed-up, we can use the legend at the bottom of the map to view just the customers who are shown with green pins. But, how do we see all the green customers for Sales Person A?

Of course, that is where the new feature comes in handy. Now, simply right click on a colored territory area (zip code) for Sales Person A (pink). Notice the look up view of pins is limited to customers that fall within that sales person’s territory. Now, right click again to undo.

Simply right click on a colored zip code for Sales Person A and the look up view of pins is now limited to the customers that fall within that sales person's territory

Moreover, we can also get a list of the customers by exporting a CSV file from Map -> Save As CSV.

we can also get a list of the customers by exporting a CSV file from Map -> Save As CSV for zip code look up

If you have any issues opening the .csv in excel try following these steps.