Faking a Map in Excel

 

US Map Simulated in Excel.
US Map Simulated in Excel.

UXBlog has a wonderful guide  to making fake maps in Excel. The technique involves putting values from a dataset into bins by rounding latitude and longitude, so that each cell in the spreadsheet represents one degree of lat/lon. If the color of the cell is computed from  the number of datapoints that fall into each cell, the data will naturally represent a map.