Everyday I get requests to tell the story behind pages and pages of data.  To be more precise to help clients understand the information contained in multi-page spreadsheets and reports.  Last week, a client wanted to display the locations of customers in a rural region to effectively schedule service calls.  Next week who knows?  

These are the challenges we get daily and the ones we accept gladly.  The starting point is usually to find out if it should be a pretty picture or a working map.  A picture gives a snap shot of the information, frozen in time.  A working map lets the users see how things change over time.

In either case, the first step is to find a common theme.  The one we most often use is the geographic component or as we often say, location data.  This component can be used to display data in interesting ways taking the user from a two-dimensional table to a three-dimensional view or map.  This map can be used in presentations, in the strategic planning exercise, the deployment of marketing campaigns and much more.

Map used to schedule service calls to customers