World Map with Bar Charts

File to download: World Map with Bar Charts.xlsx

If your company is a multinational corporation, you may be requested to generate reports to show the international performance. It comes in handy to have a world map and bar charts to show the relative performance on your dashboard. The areas of interest can be individual product lines, quarterly performance, debt/equity analysis, market share, etc. The same logic can also be applied to line chart, pie chart, area chart, and scatter chart.

Please see the following steps how I created this report. No Visual Basic Module is used for this report.

Step 1: Create the data. The data are divided into regions and then product lines.

Step 2: Try to find a world map. Google Image or Microsoft Clipart is a good start. You may want to avoid copyright issue by downloading images from government websites or websites that offer free and non-copyrighted images.

Step 3: Create a chart based on the data. It can be any type of charts you want to make. In this example, I used 3-D bar (column) charts for illustration purposes. The products to be chosen are the first four in the same region (i.e. Asia).

Step 4: Double click the newly created chart, and then click the first icon in the “Chart Layouts”. I chose this one so that I can add the chart title to it. I click on the title and change it to “Asia”. After that, I get rid of the legend to avoid too much clutter in the chart. Since I will put more than one chart on the map, I want to keep it as simple as possible. You can keep the legend if you want to.

Step 5: Cut the chart and paste it to the “Map” worksheet.

Step 6: Format the chart by choosing ‘No Fill” under “Fill” menu and “No Line” under “Border Color”. Afterwards, click “Close” button.

Step 7: Move it to the Asia area on the map. Resize the chart if necessary.

Step 8: Copy and paste the chart a few times as necessary for different geographic regions.

Step 9: Change the “data source” and the “chart title” of each individual chart by right-clicking the mouse on the chart. Afterwards, move the chart to the appropriate regions on the map one-by-one. Repeat this process as many times as necessary.