Many times, when you pitch or present, you have to show data. And they are often just numbers. Wouldn’t it be more interesting if you could make them 3D and add a video tour to them? This is really easy, using some new features of Microsoft Excel that I am going to show you.
First of all, let’s say that you want to present the potential users of your website/mobile app in Greece, Spain, France and Italy. And the numbers are the following:
| Country | Potential Users |
| Greece | 100 |
| Italy | 3333 |
| France | 2222 |
| Spain | 4444 |
Now, let’s turn this boring table to the following:
Better? Here’s how to do this:
Step 1: Get Excel 2013
Step 2: Install PowerMap from here
Step 3: Open Excel. Create Two Columns. Name the First Column “Country” and the Second Column “Users”. Write the countries you want (Greece/Italy/France/Spain in our example) and the corresponding numbers of users. Select the first Row and click on “Sort &Filter” and then “Show Filters”.
Step 4: Go to the tab “Insert”. Click on “Map” and then select “Launch PowerMap”. This will bring the following screen:
Step 5: Go again to the worksheet. Select all the table you created. Go to “Map” and Select “Add Selected Data to Power Map”. This will bring the following screen:
Step 6: Select Country and then Click “Next” on the bottom right corner. Then Select both “Country” and “Users”. Close the table that appears on the map.
Step 7: We will create 4 scenes for our video display. One scene per country. To create the first one, zoom in to Greece in the map, right-click on the orange dot and “Add Annotation”, eg write “Greece: 100 Users”.
Step 8: Click on “Add Scene” and repeat the same process for every country. E.g., on the second screen, zoom in again in Italy, right-click on the dot that exists on Italy and write something.
Step 9: Click on the settings in the right panel and choose any effects you would like to apply when moving between scenes.
Step 10: Click on “Play Tour” to view the video. Click on “Create Video” to download it.
That’s all! Congratulations, you just created your first data visualization video and you can embed it in powerpoint slides and impress your audience! If you want to deep diver into powermaps, you will find that it has much more functionality for extra layers of data visualization.
