GIS: Mapping in Excel

Students in this course can develop essential spreadsheet skills, while learning to make maps inside an Excel worksheet, using the ArcGIS for Office software. This course is designed for the newcomer to Excel to learn essential spreadsheet skills, which are important in many career paths.

This course builds a foundation for students interested in spreadsheeting, starting at the very beginning with a simple Excel orientation and moving to methods for computations and essential tabular functions. Further lessons will teach how to use filters, pivot tables, lookup functions, and how to create charts in Excel.

Students will learn how to obtain tabular data from the web and reformat that data for ingestion into the GIS (Geographic Information System). GIS datasets are based on tables that contain spatial and non-spatial content. Increasingly, map makers rely on the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet software to manage data tables and improve and ensure data quality. The ArcGIS for Office software (made by Esri, Inc) puts Excel tabular data into a GIS and then onto a map. There are then many options for managing the map’s appearance and conducting spatial analysis.  

ArcGIS for Office lets users export their Excel maps into interactive Powerpoint slides, which are useful for sharing maps with colleagues. In addition to sharing maps, other popular methods for formatting and communicating a spreadsheet’s content will be covered, such as dashboards, and other layout tools.  

There is no prerequisite GIS knowledge or Excel knowledge needed to take this course.

This is one of three secondary courses that can be taken in any order and/or concurrently with GIS core courses in the GIS Certificate.