Many Spotfire users have little or no knowledge of ESRI or 'Shape' files which are used in TIBCO Spotfire. The good news is that, since version 3.0, Spotfire natively understands this file format. When you load the shape files , just like you would load a text file, you will be able to view the underlying data table, as shown below:
This example above uses US zip (postal) codes and the shapes down the left hand side are the sub-regions which relate to each zip code. However, by default, these are usually too small to see. The visualization above is just a standard Spotfire Table, so you can change the height of the rows like this, by modifying the Table Properties:
These views should help you to understand the structure of a simple Shape/ESRI file. The important point to note is that these files contain location information inside the data table: they are not simply images like JPEG or GIF, but are more powerful than that.
Once you have the file loaded, you can also relate them to other data tables. In the example below, there are two map views, one at a high level showing one color for the whole of Europe, and another map which has one color for each of the following countries: UK, Germany, Italy and Spain.
Here are the map regions:
And here is the simplified data we want to plot. The 'values' could be oil well sizes, lab results, financial status or anything else'
To get this example to work, you then need to make a copy
of the data table shown above. The first Map Chart will be linked on the Continent column,
and the other will be linked to the Map Chart based off the Country
column.
Below is the final output showing the two Map Charts.
