What's The Craze About Heat Maps?

Do you want to know the unemployment rate in your neighborhood? Do you want to learn about the population density of your state where you live? One tool that can help you get accurate answers is heat maps. Wikipedia gave meaning to the term as "a graphical representation of data where the individual values contained in a matrix are represented as colors." That being said, we can already determine why a growing number of people today - business entrepreneurs, real estate agents, insurance policy agents, sales dealers and suppliers, and even people behind non-government organizations - utilize mapping effectively in all their endeavors.

Simply put, it is a very easy way to understand geographical representations. The instant you see a heat map, you can already determine how a measurement varies. A distinct quality of a heat map is its ability to use color gradients or progression so the user can easily depict how areas relate with one another.

Understanding Heat Maps

History reports that heat maps have been in existence since 1994. Since then, data analysis has never been better! Instead of paper works or Excel data to analyze, these maps are represented by areas and dots from a datasource like Excel files. Generating such map is ready in just a few minutes. For instance, to answer the first question mentioned at the onset of this article, heat mapping allows your map to have different colors of each area. One color (red) may represent the part with the most number and another color (yellow) may represent the part with the least number. Just by viewing the map, you can already see which part of your neighborhood has the highest unemployment rate.

By using this tool, a user is able to determine:

Location Density

Geographical areas are color coded like counties, zip codes, states and others. Thru the color coded guide, a user can easily determine which part has the most number of locations. Hence, one no longer needs to spend too much time on data analysis because the heat map makes it possible for him to visualize the data much easier. This is effective in analyzing:

· Density of data
· Election support labels
· Traffic accidents
· Crime rates
· Mobile or cable network signal strength
· Density population analysis

Sum and Average of Any Numeric Field

Another good thing about creating a heat map is that it helps create a territory map containing the sum or the average of a certain value based on the user's Excel data. This is a helpful tool for analyzing business sales. If you have an annual sales data in your spreadsheet, simply include that data and the map will give you a visualization of what area has the most sales compared to the area with the least sales. From there, you can make step-by-step action plans to improve and strengthen your services. This is effective in analyzing:

· Sales turnover by each area
· Market concentration per sales territory
· Volume concentration per sales territory

Now that you know the craze about creating heat maps, do not let yourself be left behind.

For many years, Miranda Dixson has been an expert writer for GIS technology and its application to many organizations. She specializes in writing about mapping and geocoding services. You can send her an email at contact@topo.ly. You can also learn more about GIS technology as you visit http://mapping.topo.ly.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Miranda_Dixson