ArcGIS Maps for Office

ArcGIS Maps for Office: Your Maps in Excel and PowerPoint

ArcGIS Maps for Microsoft Office is an add-in to Excel and PowerPoint that enable you to create maps in your spreadsheets! You can use it to explore and visualize spatial relationships and patterns in your data and share the maps with colleagues, co-workers, and the world. You can easily export the maps from Excel to use in your presentations.

To download the software on your personal computer, visit http://www.esri.com/software/maps-for-office. The computers in the CCGT training room and collaborative space (406A and 412 Cooper) have the add-in installed.To use it, you will need an account with ArcGIS, though you do not need any prior experience. By connecting Excel to your ArcGIS account, you are able to pull other data from the cloud into your map, enrich your data with demographic data from ESRI, and publish your spreadsheets as geospatial datasets in the cloud. The app is added to an existing Office installation, and will show up as another tab on the ribbon. In Office, simply select the ArcGIS Maps tab and sign in to enable the functionality.

Expand Your Analysis Abilities With Maps

The example data you will use are earthquake data from January 1, 2014 to August 2, 2016. Using Excel, you can analyze the data to answer fundamental questions, such as:

Who? What? When? And deduce…Why?

For instance, you can plot the occurrence of earthquakes per year. or which earthquake released the most energy:

The question that GIS enables you to answer is… Where?

For users of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), the location information is just as important for understanding and analyzing data as the other information. ArcGIS Maps for Office makes users of Microsoft Office (i.e. just about everybody!) into GIS users by enabling users to make maps and analyze spatial patterns in your data. You don’t need any mapping experience to create useful, informative, and beautiful maps.

What is ArcGIS?

ArcGIS is the leading suite of GIS software, created by Esri. The products span user types and working environments, from desktop users, field and mobile users, organizations with their own servers, and so on. ArcGIS Maps for Office is part of the Web GIS family of products, which promote easy access, storing, and sharing of data using the web instead of local computers or servers. Many other ArcGIS products (e.g. Online, Desktop, Pro, Server, Collector) have the Web GIS capabilities, so data and maps you create in Excel will be available for you to view and edit with other ArcGIS products and vice versa. Your ArcGIS account enables your use of Maps for Office.

ArcGIS Credits

Your ArcGIS account has credits attached to it. You can use service credits in exchange for storage, analytics, demographics and lifestyle maps. Your account has been initially allocated 100 credits from the Clemson University organizational account budget, though you can request more. Most features you will use today do not consume credits, such as creating maps and publishing your layers. Certain analysis tools (e.g. Hot Spots Analysis) and data enrichment have a cost per feature which you should consider before running any of these tools. For a description of service credits, visit http://www.arcgis.com/features/plans/credits.html