Ama is always looking for innovative ways to present data and information. While she frequently uses programming languages like R to visualize geographic data, she was inspired by Jonathan Schwabish’s post on Interactive Tile Grid Maps in Excel. Motivated to expand her visualization toolkit, she designed an interactive tile grid map that displays the percentage of children in U.S. families receiving public assistance from 2013 to 2017.

Guided by Schwabish’s tutorial and her own codebook method, Ama built the map using several built-in Excel features—Bar Charts, Data Validation, IF statements, and VLOOKUP, without relying on VBA. The result is a visually compelling and informative dashboard. She also documented part of her process in a blog post detailing how to create a static tile grid map in Excel.