How to Enable Map Chart in Excel

Creating a map chart in Excel turns a boring table of locations and numbers into a visually impressive story about your business. It allows you to see regional sales performance, website traffic distribution, or customer locations at a glance. We’ll walk through how to prepare your data, create your first map chart, and customize it to tell a clear and compelling story.

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What Exactly is a Map Chart in Excel?

A Map Chart in Excel plots your data onto a geographical map. Instead of just seeing state or country names in a list, you see them colored and shaded on a world or country map, with the color intensity representing a specific value, like sales, population, or website visits. For example, a darker shade of blue could represent higher sales, while a lighter shade shows lower sales.

This feature uses Microsoft's Bing Maps service to recognize geographical locations like:

• Countries and Regions
• States and Provinces
• Counties
• Postal Codes (like ZIP codes in the US)

Map charts are incredibly useful for visualizing spatial trends that would be hard to spot in a simple table or bar chart, helping you answer questions like "Which state is our top market?" or "Where are our website visitors coming from?"

Prerequisites: Does Your Excel Have Map Charts?

Before you start, it’s important to know that the Map Chart feature is not available in all versions of Excel. It's a modern feature that relies on an internet connection to work. You'll need one of the following versions to create map charts:

• Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365): Both Windows and Mac users with a subscription have access. This is the most reliable way to get this feature.
• Excel 2019: The single-purchase version of Excel 2019 includes map charts.
• Excel for the web: The free online version of Excel can create these charts.
• Excel on Mobile: Versions for Android and iOS also support this feature.

If you're using an older version like Excel 2016, 2013, 2010, or earlier, you won't find the map chart option. For these charts to work, you also need an active internet connection so Excel can communicate with the Bing Maps service to plot your data accurately.

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How to Prepare Your Data for a Map Chart

The secret to a successful map chart isn’t in complex chart settings, it's in well-structured data. Excel needs clean, unambiguous location data to plot everything correctly. Messy data is the number one reason map charts fail.

1. Use a Clear Column for Locations

Your data should have at least two columns: one for the geographical locations (like state, country, or postal code) and one for the numerical data you want to visualize (like sales figures or user counts).

For example, a simple dataset might look like this:

2. Format Your Data as an Excel Table

This is arguably the most important step. Formatting your data range as an official Excel Table makes it much easier for Excel to understand and work with. It's a simple step that prevents many common errors.

• Click on any cell within your data range.
• Go to the Home tab and click Format as Table, or simply press Ctrl + T (or Cmd + T on a Mac).
• A small box will pop up. Make sure the option "My table has headers" is checked and click OK.

Your data will now be formatted in a striped style and will be treated as a structured table, which is exactly what the Map Chart feature wants.

3. For Best Results, Use the Geography Data Type

Sometimes, location names can be ambiguous. Is "WA" Washington state or Western Australia? Excel’s Geography data type helps solve this problem by connecting your text to a rich online database.

How to Convert to a Geography Data Type:

1. Select the cells in your location column (e.g., the column with country or state names).
2. Go to the Data tab in the ribbon.
3. In the "Data Types" group, click on Geography.

If Excel successfully recognizes your locations, a small map icon will appear to the left of each cell's text. You'll be prompted to correct any locations that Excel isn't sure about.

The magic of this data type is that you can now pull in additional information. A small "Add Column" icon appears at the top right of your table. Click it to add columns for population, area, leaders, and more, directly pulled from online sources.

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4. Resolve Ambiguity with Helper Columns

If you don't use the Geography data type, or if you're plotting smaller regions like counties, you might need to give Excel more context. For example, many different states have a "Washington County."

To fix this, create a helper column. If you have a list of counties, add a "State" column right next to it. Excel is smart enough to use the extra column as context to pinpoint the correct location.

For example, this data is ambiguous:

This data gives Excel the necessary context:

Creating Your First Map Chart: A Step-by-Step Guide

Once your data is clean and formatted as a table, creating the chart is surprisingly easy. There is no special "enable" switch to flip, you enable the feature simply by using it.

1. Select Your Data: Click any single cell inside your formatted Excel table. You don't need to highlight the entire table, Excel knows to use all of it.
2. Insert the Map Chart: Go to the Insert tab on the ribbon. In the Charts group, click the Maps icon, then select Filled Map.
3. Done! Excel Creates the Chart: Excel will automatically create a map chart based on your data and place it on your worksheet. It will assign a gradient color scale based on your numerical values.

How to Customize Your Map Chart

Your default map chart is a great start, but customization is what transforms it from a simple graphic into a professional reporting tool.

Using the Chart Design Tab

When you click on your map chart, two new tabs appear on the ribbon: Chart Design and Format. The Chart Design tab is your primary tool for cosmetic changes.

• Add Chart Element: Control the chart title, legend, and data labels here. For maps, turning on data labels can be cluttered, so use it carefully.
• Quick Layout: Choose from several pre-designed layouts for the title and legend.
• Change Colors: Select a new color palette for your map in one click.

Fine-Tuning Map-Specific Options

For more detailed control, right-click on the map itself (on one of the colored regions) and select Format Data Series.... This opens a pane on the right side of your screen with powerful, map-specific options.

Series Options

• Map projection: This sets how the spherical globe is presented on a flat screen. "Automatic" usually works well, but options like "Mercator" (standard web map view) or "Albers" (good for continents) are available.
• Map area: "Automatic" will zoom in on the regions in your data. "Only regions with data" is a great way to hide irrelevant countries. "World" shows the entire globe.
• Map labels: Choose to "Show all" country/state names, only show them on a "Best fit only" basis, or turn them "Off" completely.

Series Color

• Here, you control the shading. The default is a 2-color sequential scale (e.g., light blue to dark blue). You can change this to a 3-color diverging scale, which is perfect for showing positive, neutral, and negative values. For example, you could set low values to red, mid-range values to yellow, and high values to green to instantly identify top, middle, and bottom performers.

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Troubleshooting Common Map Chart Issues

Even with perfect preparation, you might run into a few hurdles. Here’s how to solve them.

Error: "We can't create a map chart for this data"

This typically means your location data is not being recognized. The fix is almost always to go back to the data preparation steps. Double-check that your location column contains only geographical data (no numbers mixed in). Converting to the Geography Data Type is the best way to resolve this.

My Map is Blank or Missing Locations

If your chart appears, but some (or all) locations are missing, it means Bing Maps couldn't find a match for those specific names. This can happen with abbreviations or ambiguous names. Try spelling out the full name (e.g., "United States" instead of "USA") or adding a helper column for more context (like listing the hemisphere for similar country names).

Final Thoughts

Excel's Map Chart function is a powerful tool for anyone working with geographical data. By ensuring your data is clean, formatted as a table, and free of ambiguity, you can quickly move from a spreadsheet of numbers to an insightful map visualization that’s ready for any presentation or report.

The manual data preparation required for Excel is a great first step, but what if your reports depend on live data from many different places like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Salesforce? That's where we wanted to remove the friction. Instead of downloading CSVs and constantly formatting data, you can use Graphed to connect your business data sources once. Then, just use plain English to ask questions like, “Show me a map chart of sales from Shopify and traffic from Google Analytics by state this quarter.” We automate the entire analysis process and build real-time, shareable dashboards instantly.