Maps are a very powerful tool for visualization of geographical data. The Power-user Library includes 350 maps, including every country in the world but also regional or city maps. 

All the maps are completely editable. On top of that, one of the key capabilities of these maps is that they behave like charts and can be automatically colored based on your data. This allows users to create powerful visualizations, dashboards and more that can be easily updated when new data is available.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• How to insert Maps from the Library
• Editing and customizing Maps
  • Manually editing the Maps
  • Automatically coloring the Maps
  • Customizing the Maps
• Getting additional maps
  • Downloading optional maps
  • Requesting custom maps

How to insert Maps from the Library

• From the Power-user tab, click Library. The Library pane will open at the right of your screen. If it's the first time you are using it, or if there are new content updates available, you may see it loading for a moment.
• Select the Maps tab, and search for a map using the search bar on top, the scrollbar or the Categories.
• Simply click a map to insert it in the current file, whether it is a PowerPoint presentation, Excel spreadsheet or Word document.

Facing problems with the Library? Here are the 2 most frequent issues:
The templates / icons / maps are not downloading in the Library
The mouse cursor is flickering in the right pane

Editing and customizing Maps

Manually editing the Maps

Each map is basically a group of vector shapes, with one shape for each area of the map. Because they are shapes, it means you can edit them like you would with any object in PowerPoint: you can resize, recolor, change borders, add text, etc. 

You can also ungroup the map like you usually do in PowerPoint, allowing you to extract only a part of the map, or to select all the labels with area names.

Automatically coloring the Maps

Maps can be automatically colored based on your data. As such, they behave just like charts. This is a powerful capability to visualize and communicate your data. 

Each Map you insert is linked to an Excel table. This table is automatically added when you insert a Map in Excel. In PowerPoint or Word, you just need to click Edit map data from the right edition menu to access this data table. 

The table contains the list of all the areas in the map (for instance, all the countries of the Europe map below). Each area can take a specific value to automatically color the map. Replace the default values with your own data in the Value for color column of the table. Then right-click the Map and hit Refresh Maps to automatically update the map.

Although Maps are available in PowerPoint, Excel and Word, the automatic coloration code will run significantly faster in Excel than in other applications.

Customizing the Maps

You can easily customize your maps to adjust the colors, show or hide area names, values, legends, etc.

Just right-click a map and choose Edit Map Design to open the edition menu on the right. 

From this edition menu, you can change how your map will look like:

• Add, edit or remove the map title
• Show/hide area names
• Show/hide values
• Show/hide legend
• Switch from a gradient coloration to a coloration by range (e.g. to create a green/orange/red color code)
• Edit the fill color
• Edit the outline color

Getting additional maps

Downloading optional maps

On top of the main maps, you can download an optional set of maps for islands. To download these maps, click the Settings button located at the very left of the Power-user ribbon (with a blue cog icon). Click the download icon next to Optional libraries, select Islands and validate. 

The optional maps will show up as a separate Source in the Library task pane.

Requesting custom maps

Power-user can be customized with more maps that we can create on demand. For instance, we can create a custom Map with your organization's geographical regions. Contact us if you would like to request a custom map to be added to the Library.