Good way to make color coded map graphics?

[limpyhobbler]

Anybody know a good free or cheap way to make color coded maps of the world countries or the US, or Europe, or Asia, etc.?

It would be based on a data set that is stored like this:
name:value

I was on wikipedia looking at this page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Male_Life_Expectancy.png

I followed the link in the image description and found it had been created using GunnMap at http://gunn.co.nz/map/.

Anybody used that tool?
What's a better tool for creating these images?

Any any info appreciated. thanks!

[ChromeFoundry]

1. Here is a way to do US States in MS Excel

I have not tried this and I do not know if this will work under OpenOffice.

http://www.andypope.info/ngs/ng12.htm

Hope it helps.

[limpyhobbler]

3. ok so

that looked promising but I have Excel 2003. I did a few more web searches and I think that map feature was something that existed in Excel up until maybe Office 2000 and then they stopped including it? That's what it looks like as best I can tell.

I'm looking into maybe doing something with SVG graphics. Might take a small amount of programming though, and I'm a bit rusty.

This is what I'm looking at:
http://flowingdata.com/2009/11/12/how-to-make-a-us-county-thematic-map-using-free-tools/

I want to generate image files based on data, so I'm not sure if Google Maps is going to do that with just the basic map tools. It might require the Google maps API. So then it's getting kind of programmy again.

thanks for the tips.

[ChromeFoundry]

4. Worked fine in Office 2010

Looks like it has 50 Shape polygons and they are using the Shape.Fill command to modify the color.

The Workbook.Shapes property seems to be supported in versions 2003 VBA:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa174301%28v=office.11%29.aspx

and also 2005-2010:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.office.interop.excel.shape_members.aspx

You may have to enable macros and scripts for the "update state colors" button to function.

[ChromeFoundry]

2. Using Google Maps

http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/2006/12/google-map-creator-makes-thematic.html

[HopeHoops]

5. I've done hundreds of them in MapInfo. It isn't cheap, but it works.