As you work in Excel, you’ll find yourself using a wide variety of data. It’s often useful to categorize and classify this data to make it more useful for you. For example, Excel lets you add geographic information to place names. This is very easy to do. Let’s learn how to use Geography in Microsoft Excel.
How to Use Geography in Excel
Imagine a list of place names: Rome, Dallas, Hong Kong, and more. You might find it helpful to add key details about these places to your data. For example, you may want users to hover over a place name and see photographs, population statistics, and more.
Geography is one of Excel’s data types. By assigning it to given data, you can easily link geographic details from the web, powered by Microsoft’s Bing search engine.
To get started, select the cell or cells containing place names that you want to classify. Then, go to the Data tab. You’ll find this on Excel’s ribbon, the list of menus across the top of your screen.
On the left side, you’ll see two data type options: Stocks and Currencies. Immediately to their right, you’ll see an arrow button. Click on it, and you’ll see a third choice appear: Geography.
Once you see the Geography button, click on it. Excel will apply the Geography data type to your selected data. Notice now that each cell now contains a tiny map thumbnail.
These map icons are clickable. Once you select one, Excel will launch a popup with many key statistics about the given location. For example, you’ll likely see a photo, GPS coordinates, local demographic information, and more.
As you can see, Excel’s Geography feature is a great way to add interesting information to your spreadsheets. It classifies existing data and leans on the power of online data to deliver extra interest. Try it out any time you’re working with geographic data in Excel.
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