Create your first map

Map Wizard is Vizualist tool that is designed to help you create data-driven maps that make presenting data easy, flexible, and beautiful.

How to prepare the CSV data file

This step is the most important step when it comes to creating a map.
Please read everything explained very carefully and go through all steps below to prepare your data file properly before you upload your data file to the Map Wizard tool.
If your data file is not properly prepared, the tool cannot match your data file to one of the basemaps you have selected.
Also, if you want to make any changes to your data file after you’ve uploaded it into the tool, you’ll have to do it outside the Map Wizard. The Map Wizard is not a data preparation tool, so you will need first to make changes to your data file and then upload it again to the tool.

Your data file must meet the following conditions:

Your data file must be saved as CSV format.
Your data file must have one unique column with FIPS/ISO codes.

FIPS codes are numbers that uniquely identify geographic areas. The number of digits in FIPS codes varies depending on the level of geography.
State-level FIPS codes have two digits, County-level FIPS codes have five digits of which the first two are the FIPS code of the State to which the County belongs, and Tract-level FIPS codes have eleven digits of which the first five are the FIPS code of the State and County to which the Tract belongs. FIPS codes for Canada Provinces and Territories have two digits.
ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 codes are three-letter World country codes defined in ISO 3166-1, part of the ISO 3166 standard published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), to represent countries, dependent territories, and special areas of geographical interest.
The column with FIPS/ISO codes must be formatted as text.

Downloadable templates are available below. You can use them for preparing your data file or to compare the FIPS/ISO codes column with the one in your data file.
After downloading the templates, please try to open them as text with the program you use (e.g. Excel, Numbers, Google Spreadsheet, etc). Otherwise, you may lose starting zeros for certain FIPS codes, because many programs will recognize the textual FIPS codes column as a numeric column and format it automatically. If that happens, you will need to add the zeros to certain FIPS codes.
For example, for US States data file you will need to add zeros in front of numbers 1 to 9, and for US Counties for numbers 1001 to 9015.
For Canada and World template no changes are needed.
Your data file must have at least one value column.

How to create a map

Go to the Vizualist dashboard, choose a project where you want to create your map and select the Maps tab.
Click the Create map button .
Enter the title for your map, and click the CREATE MAP button. This will launch the Map Wizard window.
Select one of the basemaps and click Next button.

Switch to JSON Editor – Opening the map in a JSON editor translates it to the JSON format and allows adding additional features using the current map schema. This is an irreversible action for this map! Once you switch to JSON Editor you won’t be able to switch back to the current interface.
Upload your CSV data file via the drag and drop method or click on Browse.

To render your map correctly, your dataset needs to contain a unique column with geographic reference ( State-level, County-level or Tract-level FIPS codes for US, FIPS codes for Canada Provinces and Territories, or ISO alpha-3 for World, geography level unique name), and at least one value column.
Click Next button.
Select the GEO columns to connect the basemap with your data.

If these numbers are not the same, that means there is a difference in the selected FIPS/ISO codes columns. Areas that don’t match will be grayed out on the map.
If 0 rows are matched then either you did not select the appropriate columns that can be matched or the file you uploaded was not properly prepared.

Click Create button.