Dear Quants,I've just signed up for this forum and I like it already. I thought I'd post a MS Excel probelm here that I've been pondering on for a while. Maybe someone knows the answer. Here's what I want to go:I want to put a map of Europe into xls and format each country in a different colour (to show various risk scenarios). The whole thing should be linked to my rating model. The ratings are based on various economic factors. I've designed the model so that you can vary the inputs (eco data) and the output values then assume different colours since the model is for a presentation. Right now, I just have cells with the country names in them, but I figure it would look much more impressive, if I had a map instead and the whole country changed colour.I thought of formatting the cells into tiny little squares and then manually mapping the countries like that. Does anyone have a better method?Thanks!YH

Although it's probably way more labour than you'd like (and not suitable for quick update cycles) I've had success/fun creating Excel files that compute XML strings that create a valid file for a graphics program (Omnigraffle in my case). In my case, I had ZERO documentation on the application's file format but it was pretty easy to create some shapes in the graphics application, look at the resulting saved file's XML, and deduce how to synthesize XML that would draw what I wanted where I wanted.I'd imagine that one could replicate this for .PPTX to compute a Powerpoint slide.That said, I'd bet that some clever VBA/plug-in developer has a downloadable thing that would do this.

The simple way is to have a borderless image for each country

There are several ways to do that in R:http://r-spatial.sourceforge.net/galler ... honPerhaps RExcel could of help in using the above from Excel:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RExcel

I used this guide to build something like this for a friend of mine in risk management to show exposures:http://www.clearlyandsimply.com/clearly ... l.htmlHere is a black and white example you can change to colour:http://www.clearlyandsimply.com/clearly ... l.htmlIt's only country level thought. But if you look up a county/province level svg for each country it's easy to increase the granularity. Here is England as an example:http://www.clearlyandsimply.com/clearly ... el.htmlThe final one I worked on was similar to this one but with Europe at the county level (they licensed the SVG files for it from a map company so I can't share):http://www.clearlyandsimply.com/clearly ... excel.html