Create beautiful custom-zoomed maps

Published 11/2/18 — We have to admit, here at Avantalytics one of the things we are most proud of are our brightly colored heat maps. These insight panels provide a vibrant way of quickly seeing a large amount of data and being able to mentally process it in a holistic way, which is a great way to display different types of data for different types of learners. Their ability to also zoom in on specific regions allow users to customize their views to suit their needs. Check out this example panel of heat maps (click all images to enlarge):

We can quickly see how an Avantalytics user can create a panel to suit very specific needs. But before now, users had to reset the zoom every time they refreshed their view, and we know that no one appreciates having to do redundant tasks. We have now built our panels to save not just the gear settings for a heat map that you have created, but the zoom for it as well. Let's see how it works:

First, you will want to go to any heat map insight panel you have saved to a view. If you have not saved one, you may drop one onto a view. If you do not know how to create views, check out our Learning Views tutorial. Go ahead and click the + or - key and, by clicking anywhere on the screen and dragging your mouse, move the map around until you reach the desired zoom and pan to outline the area you want. I zoomed in and dragged my Days of Rain to the right until I was able to center in on New England, in case I want to watch how the rain has been affecting the sale of patio and garden items for example.

Looks like the top part of New England got pretty wet! Maybe we want to keep tracking the pattern of weather in this specific area for a while, and we want to go ahead and lock the zoom so we don't have to reset the map every time we login? Getting this set up is pretty simple. Go ahead and head up to your Settings Gear for the insight panel:

In the Settings Gear, you will see a dropdown menu labeled "Save Zoom/Pan State." You will see that this is already set to "Yes." This does not mean that the zoom was already locked into place, simply that the default answers to the question are yes or no once you actually navigate to the Settings Gear to select an option. In other words, you always need to lock your zoom into place by hitting the Settings Gear, verifying that the dropdown menu is already set to "Yes" by default and then clicking the "Save." button. Once you have done this, your map will reload to the same zoom and pan as you have set up and saved at this time. We hope this feature helps you design some great views and saves you a bit of time. Thanks for using Avantalytics for your retail analytics needs!