Creating a Point Map with Google Fusion Tables

Creating a point map with Google Fusion Tables Your VCU Google account does not include Google Fusion Tables. So you must log in with a different Google account. Then go to Google Drive … New … More … and find Google Fusion Tables. (You may need to “Connect more apps” the first time you do this.) Find the Excel file “TRI_VA_2015_map.xlsx”. Click Next ... Next … Finish. The file looks like a Google Spreadsheet: The columns in yellow are ones that Google “thinks” might be geo-locations. Google also saw that your data set has latitude and longitude – and by default, it created a map based on those coordinates. You can see this if you click on “Map of Latitude”. You can rename that to say “Map of TRI facilities”: It looks like Google Fusion Tables found all of the facilities in our list and put them on the map. But it made all of the dots the same. And if you click on a dot, you get random columns from the data set: Let’s fix those two things. We’re going to “Change feature styles” to make the dots different sizes or colors depending on how much pollution the facility emits. And then we’ll “change info window” (the pop-up). When you click on “change feature styles,” you have various choices. We’re going to use “Buckets” – six buckets – based on the “ON-SITE_RELEASE_TOTAL” column. The buckets will be (in terms of pounds): 0 to 1 1 to 1,000 1,000 to 50,000 50,000 to 100,000 100,000 to 1,000,000 1,000,000 to 1,200,000 How did I decide the limits for each bucket? By sorting the data in Excel and looking for natural breaks. Besides setting the limits on each bucket, give each bucket a different icon. And then click Save: While you’re changing the map’s feature styles, do the legend, too: Now your map should look like this: Then click on … Here, we can specify which columns we want the info window to display: Latitude and longitude, of course, won’t mean anything to most people. So pick these columns: FACILITY_NAME STREET_ADDRESS CITY COUNTY CHEMICALS AIR WATER ON-SITE-RELEASE-TOTAL Then click on “Custom,” and modify the HTML. Tweak the labels, add the word “pounds” when appropriate: Test your pop-ups: Click the “Done” button: The last step is to publish the map. First, click on the “Share” button at the top-right corner of your screen. Make your map public (view only): Then, under Tools, click on Publish: This gives you a URL and the embed code. I usually make the dimensions bigger: Copy the URL and the embed code into a text document. With Google Fusion Tables, the URL is always unwieldy … https://fusiontables.google.com/embedviz?q=select+col0+from+1MRYPGW3XqcBydy9E0f6mwg11lGUb Y_RVcRTu4Lzb&viz=MAP&h=false&lat=37.91735364834129&lng=- 79.09125601562499&t=1&z=8&l=col0&y=2&tmplt=2&hml=TWO_COL_LAT_LNG … so shrink it with bit.ly or tinyurl.com Here’s the embed code: <iframe width="700" height="400" scrolling="no" frameborder="no" src="https://fusiontables.google.com/embedviz?q=select+col0+from+1MRYPGW3XqcBydy9E0f6mwg11l GUbY_RVcRTu4Lzb&viz=MAP&h=false&lat=37.91735364834129&lng=- 79.09125601562499&t=1&z=8&l=col0&y=2&tmplt=2&hml=TWO_COL_LA T_LNG"></iframe> You can also click on the name of your Google Fusion Table … … and edit the meta data: The end result: .

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