We have added a new feature to export Social Explorer slide shows to Microsoft PowerPoint.

Here is how it’s done:

Fist, you must be logged in either directly or by IP range.
1. click File->New Slide show
2. add a few slides
3. click File->Export to PowerPoint
4. set presentation title then click OK
5. wait while our system produces the slide show.

fig 1. Creating and exporting a slide show to PowerPoint.

fig 2. Enter presentation title and click OK to export.

fig 3. Save or Open the PowerPoint presentation.

Now that you have your presentation in PowerPoint, you can set slide transition property to move to next slide every x seconds. In fig. 4, I set the presentation to move to next slide every second, thereby animating the slide show. This works really well when you have maps over time. For example, you can show how U.S. grew from 1790 to 2000.

fig 4. Set Advance slide property to all slides in the presentation. This will automatically move to next slide every x seconds when the presentation is running.

Sample Presentation: Download 1790-2000 Population Density

Thanks to the good folks at the Opera Software company, we now support Opera Browser version 8 and 9. Opera used to report itself as MSIE in the navigator.appName() javascript function prior to release 9, so when they switched to identifying themselves as Opera, our scripts were a bit off.

Another important update! Map version 12.6 release displays missing values with cross hatched lines and features that are not populated enough to compute a statistically significant outcome (our rule is less than 100 population count) are colored light gray.

Fig. 1 – Census tracts 1950, % Black Population. Notice New Jersey has missing data so it is crossed out, and some tracts in NY are grayed out because not enough people live there.

Over the weekend we updated maps to version 12.6. A few minor tweaks and additions, but they will make your map viewing more pleasant. We updated the streets layer to blend into the map a bit more and we are now using a single color for all streets so it is easier to distinguish them from other map features. I won’t bore you with details but take a look at the difference between version 12.5 and 12.6.

ver. 12.5

ver. 12.6

We have been working on this data release for many months now, creating census tables, variables, maps, meta data and everything in between. Working with these historical data is hard because there are inconsistencies, some missing data, malformed table structures and other gotchas. Sometimes the data just don’t add up, and there is little you can do about it. But by and large, things came together very well. We really did not skimp on anything; we invested massive amounts of time making fine adjustments. How fine? Consider coming up with concise table titles and keeping them consistent over 15 decades of data. Even that seemingly simple task is actually pretty hard given that the questions keep changing thought the decades.

We are currently cross-checking the data for consistency and making sure everything adds up properly. We will likely bring these datasets out of beta very quickly because we have already done so much testing.

It is exciting and inspiring to finally see Andrew Beveridge’s vision, of visualizing U.S. from 1790 to 2000, come to life!

We hope you enjoy it!

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Here you will find latest news about Social Explorer, as well as useful information about various topics pertaining to Social Explorer, like new feature additions, data releases, bug fixes, various map design topics amongst others.

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-Social Explorer