I’ve simply massaged existing map shapes to make them more functional. You could probably draw some lines and use Visio’s Fragment function to separate Nunavut from NWT.

With maps, there’s always somebody who’s been left out, but I assure you it’s nothing personal!

My guess is that a lot of Visio map-shape usage is to illustrate broad concepts, like “Q1 Sales in Alberta”, where the color of the province is interesting,but every last detail of the border is not.

It is an actual territory, just like Yukon and Northwest, so not having it is like not having any other province/state.

This is something I’ve been wanting to work on for awhile. The map shapes that come with Visio are too complicated, and I would like to provide some rougher-maps one of these days. There are definitely lots of applications of high-level, lower-res maps!

In the meantime, you can do the following:

1. Get the good ol’ USA from this template: Map of World
2. Slowly union bits and pieces of the US together. Draw a big rectangle over the middle states, but don’t cross any Canada/Pacific/Mexico/Atlantic borders, then union a few states at a time to that rectangle…and the resulting blob.

Doing “everything at once” will give you the error, but as you union, you can actually decrease complexity in some circumstances.

The maps are taken from older versions of Visio and spruced up by me. I don’t worry about border disputes, because the maps are for illustrative purposes, and it’s a slippery slope to go down when one starts worrying about every nook and cranny on the globe, and who owns what.

You might want to learn about Visio’s Fragment operation. You can learn more in this article: Visio Snowflake Generator

Also: Smart Chamfer – A Corner That Doesn’t Stretch has information about fragmenting Visioi shapes.

This is a simple map to show the Territory of Nunavut. I hope you can make the change to the map, as I am not that smart. If you do make the changes, would you kindly e-mail me the visio map/shapes, please?

1. “I” didn’t depict anything. I modified shapes that ship with Visio.
2. How ’bout some references or input as to what is wrong or missing or upside down?

Cheers,

Chris

On your map of Canada you do not correctly depict the Northwest Territories and Nunavut.

Gordon

One thing that you could do with Visio 2007 Professional is link Data Graphics (data-related annotations/adornments to shapes) to state-shapes from Excel data. But the key to the data would be fairly simple, such as State = “Mississippi”

It wouldn’t be a fancy-schmancy geo-coded, address-lookup relationship.

So for example, you could have a U.S. Map or a region thereof, and show sales performance based on color–from your Excel data. Hot states could be red, under-performing states could be blue, etc, depending on how you defined the Data Graphic.

- Chris

I’m not sure how much geo-coding the Visio 2007 map shapes have. They do have some info that allows them to be positioned relative to each other, but I think that’s just graphical info, not real geo-coding.

There is a hidden field called “User.MapData” inside of each map shape, but I’m not sure exactly what it is for.

So the answer is not “No”, it’s “I’m not sure”.

Visio 2007 has a lot of cool data-related features, and it may be that with just a little coding or some clever setting-up, you can get what you are looking for. Maybe someone else will chime in with a comment…

Here are two slightly-related articles that might be of interest to you:

Getting geography data from Visio
Flags of the World