Choose your visualization

Easily switch between different types of visualisations with the click of a button. Data can be viewed as maps, bar charts, line graphs and scatter plots.

Animate changes over time

Maps, bar charts and scatter plots can all be animated over time.

Zoom into map regions

Select map regions such as Europe or Africa, or define your own custom region. Maps and visualizations will narrow down to the selected region and provide additional details.

Hide or reveal details

Change the level of detail by hiding or revealing interface components, country names or statistics.

Customize

Customize the colors and value ranges of maps and graphs.

Export

Export maps for use in other applications or publications.

Automatically import data

Automatically import data using the Excel-based data editor to create new maps and visualizations within minutes.

Create different map types

StatPlanet can used to create quantitative, qualitative and proportional symbol maps.

Customize the appearance

Completely customize the appearance of StatPlanet by selecting the interface components you wish to include, the map details to be displayed, as well as the colors of the interface, maps and graphs.

Customize the experience

There are numerous options to customize the experience users will have when using StatPlanet. For example, one can add mouse-over indicator descriptions, country popups displaying country-specific details, customized map regions, and automatic shifting to different map regions depending on the indicator selected.

Select country on the world map

• Mouse over country: Moving the mouse over a country on the world map brings up a popup containing information about that particular country for the selected indicator (as well as the bookmarked indicator, if there is one). In addition, the country data for all indicators in the current category is shown in the indicators window.
• Click on country: You can select a country by clicking on it in the map. This will highlight the country in the graph, and can also be used to define a custom region. See also the Country selection window. Note that countries can also be selected by clicking on them in the graph.
  

• Change map colors: Clicking on any of the colors in the legend will bring up a color selection window. In this window you can change both the colors (either Sequential or Diverging color schemes), as well as the number of color classes (between 3 and 9). The color schemes are from the Color Brewer website, which is an excellent resource for more information on selecting map colors.
• Change map legend ranges: To adjust the data range of the map legend, click on any of the values. Use the popup to increment or decrement the value, or enter a new value.

• Zoom: You can zoom in and out of the map using the 'zoom in' and 'zoom out' buttons, or by dragging the zoom slider up or down. If your mouse has a scroll wheel, you can also use this to zoom in and out.
• Moving the map: click and drag the map with the mouse to move it to a new position.
• Restore map position: the button shown on the left restores the map to the original coordinates for the selected region.

In the Graph window (see "Bar chart" above) you will find the time series button. When you click on this button, a list of countries appears which you can add to the time series graph. Click on a country to add it to the graph, and click on it again if you wish to to remove it. (See also Country selection window)

Use the "sort" button to sort the time series labels.

In the top left of the Graph window (see "Bar chart" above) you will find the scatter plot button. Clicking on the button will automatically use the selected indicator as the x-axis variable. You need to select a second indicator as the y-axis variable.

Indicators can be selected either from the Indicator window, or in the graph window (see below).

Use the drop-down menu in the top of the graph window to change the scale of the 'bubbles' according to a selected indicator.

Use the 'options' icon in the graph window to show or hide the trendline. Move the mouse over the trendline to see the slope and trendline equation. (See also the Wikipedia article Linear regression)

Note: the x-axis and y-axis indicators are shown in seperate windows to the left of the graph window. The y-axis indicator is shown in Indicator window, and the x-axis indicator in the Bookmarked window right below.

Select x-axis / y-axis indicator
Click on the x-axis or y-axis label, then select an indicator from the drop-down menu.

To change the graph size, move the mouse to the sides or corners of the graph window until you see the cursor change to look like the one shown on the left. Click and hold down the left mouse button, then drag the window to the size you want . Release the mouse button once you have the right size.

Use the drop-down menu in the top of the indicators window to select a new category (online version only).

To open the country selection window, click the 'select' button in the bottom-left corner of the screen. A list of countries will appear according to the region selected. Click to select the countries you wish to show on the map or in the graph window. To narrow down the list of countries, select a region from the drop-down menu in the indicators window. You can also press the first letter of a country name to quickly jump to a country in the list.

Clear selection
Press this button to clear your selection.

Offline version: Copy table
The offline version of StatPlanet does not allow you to save the data as a file. Instead, you can copy the entire table into Excel using the 'copy' button, and then 'paste' it in Excel. If you do not have Excel, you can also do the following: (i) paste the data into a basic text editor such as Notepad, (ii) save the document as 'data.html', (iii) open the file using your Web Browser.

Map:

• Map colors: map background, map borders, map text color, map text outline color, etc.);
• Map text size;
• Map symbol size (proportional symbol map symbols);
• Map legend - estimate best value distribution: adjust the values so that there is a more equal distribution of countries for each color class. This will usually result in a map with a better distribution of colors. If this is switched off, the value range for each color class will be set at equal intervals based on the highest and lowest value in the data range.
• Map legend - show maximum & minimum values
• Map legend colors.

Graph:

• Graph colors: background, bar & scatter points, scatter point borders;
• Graph text size;
• Transparency level of graph area (bars / bubbles);
• Size of bubbles (scatter plot graph).

General options:

• Animation duration;
• Decimal places shown;
• Adjust map/graph scale:
  StatPlanet automatically adjusts the map and graph scale to suit the data set. However, in some cases you may wish to keep it fixed, for example if you have manually set the scale. You can set (or prevent) the automatic updating of the map/graph scale on (i) changing indicator, (ii) changing region, (iii) changing year. The default setting is for StatPlanet to adjust the scale when changing indicator or region, but not year.
  Note: you can press the 'refresh button' in the map legend (shown below) to auto-update the map legend for the current indicator, year and region:
  
• Choose to view statistics as percentiles.
  
  

Save/export map: (online version only)

• Image type: PNG or JPEG;
• Image size (% of original);
• Image quality (%): for JPEG images only.

• Show or hide country/region names on the map or graph (country names can be shown in full, in abbreviated form or as ISO3 codes);
• Show or hide country statistics on the map or graph (country statistics can only be shown on the horizontal bar chart);
• Show or hide the map popup and its components - bar chart, indicator and statistic;
• Show or hide various windows.