map a list

What are we talking about here? The ability to visualize a list of addresses on a map is definitely useful - and it's what we're all about here at MapAList.  Leveraging hyperlinks within maps makes them even more interactive for you and your users.   In this first post about hyperlinks, the goal is to show you how to associate a link to a website with a pin on your map.  This will allow whomever is viewing your map to click on a pin and see hyperlinks in the bubble that pops up. Furthermore, it will enable the viewer to click on the hyperlinks to navigate to a URL directly from the map.  Sound cool?  It is.  Sound hard?  Don't worry, we'll walk you through it... What does it look like from a spreadsheet perspective? There are 2 approaches to making this work, one certainly more efficient if you are dealing with multiple address records. In the sample spreadsheet below, you can see a column called Site  which is used to associate the address with a website (URL).  You ca...

What are we talking about here? So basic grouping was, well, a bit basic wasn’t it? When I ran through it with my wife for the first time she was rather impatient and starting asking me why she couldn’t change the pin colors/styles. I explained that she could and that I would walk her through it in the advanced grouping tutorial. Advanced grouping enables a lot more than simply grouping based on distinct values in a column. With advanced grouping, MapAList supports the use of operators and comparison values to create grouping rules. It then allows you to choose the pin image associated with each group. Let me show you what I mean… What does it look like from a spreadsheet perspective? In the sample spreadsheet below (which should look familiar), you can see a column called Response   which is used to differentiate each address as coming to the wedding (Yes), not coming (No), or no response (Empty).   So let’s see what we get when we map this sheet… What does it look like from a ...

What are we talking about here? Creating basic maps that simply map all addresses are useful, but grouping allows you to kick things up a notch. Let’s say you are mapping your wedding attendee list for your wedding website and want to allow the map viewer to easily differentiate between the bride’s family and the groom’s family. MapAList has a Map Type built to handle just that – it’s called Group by Distinct Column Values (using unique pin images) and can be selected in Step 4 – Configure Map of the map creation process. This Map Type allows you to tell MapAList which column in your worksheet contains the grouping attribute. MapAList then examines the values in that column and assigns a unique pin image to each distinct value. Running with the wedding example, what this means is that you would need a column in your worksheet that associates each address with the bride or groom…let’s take a look at an example. What does it look like from a spreadsheet perspective? In the sample ...

As our user count has steadily grown, the MapAList support team has received an increasing number of calls and e-mails from users looking to do more with our solution. Over 80% of the feature requests we’ve received are, well, features that already exist within the base MapAList solution. What does that tell us? What it tells me is that we need to do a better job articulating the feature set MapAList has to offer out of the box...and that’s exactly what we’re going to do. For the next several weeks we will be publishing installments of Taking Your Maps to the Next Level – a series of short tutorials meant to enable you, the user, to get more out of MapAList. Each installment will focus on a single feature, show examples of both spreadsheets and maps, and provide step by step instructions to make it work. Here’s the current plan… 01/02/09 – Basic Grouping to Show Differentiation 01/09/09 – Advanced Grouping to Show Differentiation 01/16/09 – Adding Hyperlinks to Your Map Points 01/23/0...