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Merging spreadsheet with another dataset to put it on a map

R. John Dawes

03 Dec, 2010 07:59 PM via web

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Quick Question: I am working on a an excel file for Frac Tracker. It is basically a spreadsheet of all representatives for PA and the campaign contributions they received for the 2010 election cycle. I would like to associate this data with a previous file I uploaded which is a congressional boundaries layer. What is the easiest way to associate the congressional polygons with the districts in this file so that it can be visualized? Thanks for your help and I will include a copy of the file.
Best,
R. John Dawes
Environmental Integrity Project
1 Thomas Circle, Suite 900
Washington, DC 20005
Phone: 202.263.4447
Fax: 202.296.8822
Email: ***@environmentalintegrity.org

1. Support Staff 2 Posted by Jeff Christensen on 20 Dec, 2010 07:04 PM

   

   John,

   Yes, there is a feature in Insight with which you can merge a non-spatial dataset with an existing one.

   First, review the description of this feature here: http://support.rhizalabs.com/kb/importing-data/adding-geographic-in...

   You can join two datasets together when there is a "master" dataset available in the system with an attribute that matches one from your own. For example, your "111th Congressional Districts" dataset has an attributed called "cd" (presumably for "Congressional District"; it would be good to have a better label for this attribute so others know what it means). This is unique across all the districts, meaning that a single district number only appears once in the dataset (this is important and a requirement for merging datasets).

   Here are your next steps:

   1. Ask a fractracker admin to promote your datasets of congressional districts to be a "master". This will allow you (and any other user) to merge data with these shapes. The admin should select at least "cd" as a join attribute.

   2. Alter your dataset so there is one record per district.

   Right now your spreadsheet shows many rows per district. To join this data with the shapes of the districts, this value must be unique across rows. That means there can only be one row per district number in your spreadsheet when you upload it. This means you will need to aggregate values to a district, and viewing this data per district will lose some of the detail in the original data.

   1. When you upload your data, be sure to mark the "district" column as a text field rather than a number. Joining datasets is only permitted across text attributes with unique values in both master and new dataset. Also, I note that the existing Congressional District database uses preceding zeros (e.g. "08" and not "8").

   Hope this helps,

   Jeff

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2. Jeff Christensen closed this discussion on 10 Feb, 2011 05:19 PM.

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