United States State shapes for Office

Question

I want to create visuals along the lines of CNN's "red-state, blue-state" shadings of the states in the U.S. for my project. I'm planning to do something fancier than just shading the state's shape in a color. Are there open source libraries of state shapes/polygons (or - if not open source - others) that I can import into Word, Excel, etc. that I can use to show complicated graphs based on states?

I have Map Point, but haven't been able to figure out how to shade the states in a complex way.

Answer 1

you could try google charts, it looks like http://www.woot.com is doing something similar to what you need

Answer 2

Here is a good example using google maps... I've used code like that before.. perhaps from this exact example.

http://econym.org.uk/gmap/example_states2.htm

EDIT: you might want to consider converting the states.xml into JSON... it'll be smaller (136k of XML right now!) and should load faster in most browsers.

Answer 3

There might be a couple parts to the question you are asking, but to address the first part "Are there open source libraries of state shapes/polygons...", here's a resource to check out:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:SVG_maps_of_the_United_States

It's a list of various SVG(scalable vector graphics) files which can be imported into a number of applications. Basically a giant xml representation of lines and endpoints. This can be directly converted to XAML, if you're into a more programmatic way of charting(ie, C# w/ Silverlight).

However, to address the second part regarding MS Office, Visio can import SVG files for manipulation as well. I'm unsure what type of graphs you were looking for, but I hope this can assist in some small way on your path to awesomeness ;)