![]() Randomizing would need to involve some rules around creating landmasses or grouping geography types together. Randomization: ❌ Google Sheets can certainly generate random values and can also randomize a range, but a totally random map in this context may not be very useful. For example, you could have maps called PlaceName-Geography and PlaceName-Political to view the same map with different coloring. However, if you wanted to view the same map with different details, you could save a copy of the map and edit the way it looks. We were able to create a reference table to quickly view some basic data about our map, but we could include as much information as we want, especially if we link up data from elsewhere in our spreadsheet. We can also create duplicate maps easily by copying the map string to a new place in our map table.ĭata: ✅ Working in a spreadsheet allows for easy access to various data points. When ready, we can resave our map by copying and pasting the new map string into the places table. Editing is as easy as placing a different letter in the cell. We can copy and paste the cell values from the view table back into the editor when we want to change them. Let’s see how this Google Sheet measures up to those goals:Įditing: ✅ Editing is fairly easy with this system. In Part I of this blog series, I outlined the features one might want from a mapmaking application. To do this, we can apply conditional formatting rules so that any cell where “text contains exactly” the letter, we change the font color to match the background color. You can see that this has been done in the final version below.)įinally, we want to be able to view the map without all those letters on it. (Note: you can adjust and apply the same split functions similarly to display the map references next to your map, since we saved those as a string as well. You can see this done in the image above. This time we don’t need transpose because we are splitting them out horizontally in a row. Then, at the beginning of each row in the map grid, we parse out the letters for each row with a similar SPLIT function. Finally, transpose spreads them out in a column (vertically) rather than a row (horizontally) since split would normally spread them into a row. That map string then becomes the string that the split function will split around semicolons, leaving out the semicolon (TRUE) and not skipping blank cells if we have them (FALSE). In short, from the inside of the formula out: vlookup is using the name of the place that we select in cell AC1 as a reference to lookup the corresponding map string in the places table. In the example below, I add a number to reference my city and add information about it to a table.Ĭheck out the documentation for these functions if you are not familiar with them: VLOOKUP, SPLIT, TRANSPOSE. Why not use “text is exactly”? I use “text starts with…” so that I can add a reference number to the cell, if desired, for key points on the map. You may have noticed that I used “Text starts with…” as the rule for the conditional formatting (as shown on the right side of the image above). In the example above, “l” is used for land and renders green, “w” for water rendered blue, “m” for mountains rendered purple, and “c” for city rendered orange. To style it, put a letter in each cell and give those cells conditional formatting base on what’s inside. You can use as many cells as you want for your map. Organize a section of the sheet into a map area by adjusting the size of the cells to be square units as displayed on the left in the example above. The first step in this process is to create a sheet where you can edit your maps. Conditional formatting set by the first letter inserted into the cell.
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