Author: Adam DuVander

It has been one hundred years since 1918, the year best known for seeing the end to World War I. However, there were many other important events that took place in 1918 that were unrelated to the first World War. These events fall into the categories of the Russian Civil War, politics, culture, disaster, and of course, the biggest disaster of all, World War I. Use the categories to easily navigate the map below, or read on for highlights from one hundred years ago.

View 1918: Map of Historical Significance in a full screen map

World War I

World War I, the war that resulted in the deaths of 9 million soldiers and 7 million civilians, was one of the deadliest conflicts in all of history. Among the countries with WWI-related events, based on Wikipedia’s list, are Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Czechoslovakia, England, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Iraq, Ireland, Israel (then Palestine), Italy, Jordan, Poland, Russia, Serbia, South Africa, Syria, and the United States. There’s a good reason it became known as a World War.

Using the map above, click the WWI category in order to isolate the events related to World War I.

The war began with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in June of 1914. The two sides fighting in the war were the Allies, which consisted of Britain, France, Italy, Russia, and the U.S. and the Central Powers, which consisted of Germany and Austria-Hungary, later to be joined by the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria. The Allies and the Central Powers ended the conflict on November 11th, 1918 with the Armistice of Compiègne named after the location in which the armistice was signed in Compiègne, France. However, the severity of the aftermath of the war was a factor that led to World War II in 1939.

Russian Civil War

Russia’s Civil War began at the end of 1917 and continued on into 1918. It was the immediate result of the Russian Revolutions of 1917. The Revolutions led to many different political parties vying for control of Russia’s future. The most active political parties in the Russian Civil War were the Red Army and the White Army. The Red Army fought for Bolshevik socialism and was led by Vladimir Lenin. The White Army was an anti-communist group who fought the Bolsheviks. The Allied Powers of World War I backed the White Army, and a total of eight other countries intervened in this Civil War in opposition to the Red Army.

The Russian Civil War ended in 1922 with an estimate of between 7,000,000 and 12,000,000 casualties, a large majority of which were civilians. The Russian Civil War has been described as being the greatest national catastrophe that Europe had yet seen at this point in history.

Other Political Events

Other political events of importance that occurred in 1918 include the last of the battles of the American Indian Wars between the United States and Native Americans, new voting laws in various countries, including women’s suffrage in the United Kingdom, a variety of successions and elections in several countries and the founding of the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, an organization created to fight Prohibition in the United States.

Culture

Some of the highlights of the cultural events of 1918 include the death of the last captive Carolina parakeet, the test run of the first pilotless drone in New York, the death of a magician from a trick gone awry, a new bright nova discovered, and the release of a movie in the U.S. which featured one of the oldest actors to ever star in a movie at the age of 114.

Disaster

While many amazing political and cultural gains were made in 1918, disaster also struck the year hard. The Spanish influenza ran rampant throughout the world, and many transportation systems faced disaster. This included the Great Train Wreck of 1918 in Tennessee, the sinking of Princess Sophia in what is known as the greatest maritime disaster in the Pacific Northwest, the explosion of a Japanese Naval battleship, and the worst railroad accident in world history located in Brooklyn, New York. Natural disasters also made frequent appearances in 1918. Earthquakes, fires, and tornados struck the world and 1,000 pilot whales became stranded in the Chatham Islands.

1918 was a very memorable year indeed, and here we are, one hundred years later! Click around to see more, or plot some history with your own map today.

If you’re like us, you keep a lot of data in Google Spreadsheets. With many of the features of Excel and the ability to easily collaborate, it’s no wonder this has become the go-to for many business and personal use cases. At BatchGeo, we’ve noticed spreadsheets are a popular place to store location data, such as customer locations.

That’s why we built a way to quickly turn spreadsheets into maps. Below we’ll show you the best way to convert your Google Spreadsheets data into beautiful, interactive maps. In fact, this works for any spreadsheet application you use, with nothing to install or download.

1. Identify Your Location Data

Before you can make a map from your data, you’ll need to figure out if you have any geographic terms in your spreadsheet. There are many different types of location data, but it works best if it’s structured. You’ll see what we mean in the examples below.

Your location data will then be converted into geographic coordinates through a process called geocoding. The result is an estimate of the actual coordinates needed to plot the place on a map. Depending on the type of location data, the point can be highly accurate.

Addresses

Addresses are a really useful type of location data because they are common, human-readable, and specific. In fact, there’s probably an address to describe the place you live!

• Full address is a single field with an entire address, including city, state/province, and postal code.
• Segmented address is multiple fields for each piece of the address.
• Partial address may be missing a street number, a city, or other information. Most geocoders will make educated guesses for partial addresses.

If you have customer data, you may very likely have an address for them! Mapping customers can help you make important business decisions and analyze where you’ve been successful with your efforts. These maps can even help you plan specific customer visits, because an address gives you an exact location.

Regions

For many analyses, a general location is enough information to get an interesting map. If you’re looking at a global scale, having an exact address is not that different from knowing a location’s city, for example. The marker will appear to be in roughly the same place. Regional data is often easier to find than specific address-level data, giving you more opportunities to map your data.

Some examples of regions you can convert to geographic coordinates:

• Countries
• States or provinces
• Counties, parishes, or other localities
• Postal codes

Regions are larger than places described by an address, so the “point” provided is less specific. Typically, geocoders use centroids, such as the geographic mid-point within a city’s boundaries.

One advantage of regions is that you can often glean this from other data. For example, some services can tell you a city of the person behind an email address. You can also geolocate by IP address for visitors of a website, for example.

Coordinates

The last type of geographic data is the simplest and most specific. It is not particularly human-readable, however. Raw coordinates are referred to as latitude and longitude pairs, because there are two numbers that plot a point on a two dimensional plane representation of earth.

For example: 44.4604788, -110.8281375

You could use those two numbers to find Old Faithful, one of the Geysers of Yellowstone National Park.

Often coordinates are listed in “latitude, longitude” format. However, annoyingly, sometimes they’re written in the reverse! For this reason, it’s best to include these as separate, named, fields. In other words, if you have coordinate data, your spreadsheet should include a latitude column and a separate longitude column.

2. Copy and Paste From Your Spreadsheet

Now you’ve discovered the location data within your Excel, Numbers, Google Sheets, or other spreadsheet! You’re ready to convert your spreadsheet into a map—that’s why you’re here, right?

To create a basic map, all you need is your location data. That can be as simple as a list of addresses, like this:

• Hotel Address
• 3570 Las Vegas Boulevard South Las Vegas, NV
• 2000 Las Vegas Boulevard South Las Vegas, NV
• 3400 Las Vegas Boulevard South Las Vegas, NV
• 3799 Las Vegas Boulevard South Las Vegas, NV
• 3600 Las Vegas Boulevard South Las Vegas, NV

If that was a column in your spreadsheet, you could simply copy it and paste into the box at the top of our mapping tool. You’d end up with a map like this:

View A Few Las Vegas Hotels in a full screen map

While that’s pretty cool, you may find yourself wanting to know more details about each hotel. For example, what’s the name? And that data may very well be in your spreadsheet! Why not make it available? Let’s say your spreadsheet looks something like this:

Name	Hotel Address	Rooms
Caesar’s Palace	3570 Las Vegas Boulevard South Las Vegas, NV	3,348
Stratosphere	2000 Las Vegas Boulevard South Las Vegas, NV	2,427
The Mirage	3400 Las Vegas Boulevard South Las Vegas, NV	3,044
MGM Grand	3799 Las Vegas Boulevard South Las Vegas, NV	5,124
Bellagio	3600 Las Vegas Boulevard South Las Vegas, NV	3,950

Highlight, copy, and paste that into the map builder and you’ll end up with a similar map as before, but with more data available!

View A Few Vegas Hotels with Names/Rooms in a full screen map

Note that the color of the icon is based on the number of rooms. And when you click a marker, you can see the name, as well as the room data. If you had other columns in your spreadsheet, they’d show up here, too. Bringing your additional data into your map opens up all sorts of opportunities to explore the meaning behind your data.

For a larger example, see this map of the world’s largest hotels.

3. Tweak Fields and Settings

You can create great maps with our three step "copy, paste, click” process. Yet, there is additional power within your map waiting to be released. You can provide filtering and grouping options, show clusters of data, and aggregate fields within your dataset.

Rather than clicking that “Map Now” button after pasting in your data, click Validate & Set Options. You’ll see a handful of additional options:

Declaring a region helps the geocoder make intelligent decisions (if it’s an international map, choose that option). The location, city, state, and zip fields help you correct BatchGeo if we’ve made an incorrect assumption with your data. This is especially useful when you have multiple location fields.

Finally, the “group by” option lets you decide which of your fields you’ll show as the filtering option when the map is loaded. For my Las Vegas map, I chose “Rooms,” which is why the markers were different colors in the second map of the previous section.

Again, you have the choice to “Make Map” or uncover even more settings by clicking the “Advanced Options” button, which will show another menu like this:

Here you can change the colors and style of markers, alter the underlying map style, and more. While BatchGeo Pro options are shown above, even free versions have a lot of ways to tweak your map.

Try changing some options and see how your map looks. Go back to the edit screen (a link is sent to the email address you used to create the map) and try another option. Make your map fit your individual needs and help uncover the story within your data.

If you’re ready to create some fantastic maps, be sure to see our 5 Steps to Becoming a BatchGeo Power User article, with tips for re-ordering data and including images.

Natural disasters, such as hurricanes and fires, make a devastating impact on a community. Often, despite being surrounded by ruins, a silver lining comes forth in a community that supports each other. Locals and relief workers set up shelters, provide food, donate clothing, and more. Word of mouth becomes incredibly important for getting the word out about what is available where. A map can be an invaluable tool to amplify the community’s efforts.

You can quickly make a map of community resources, even if there isn’t currently a disaster. In this post, we walk you through an easy way to get these unstructured locations into something usable from any web browser, embedded on your website, or on mobile.

Gather and Store Locations

The list of resources is an important part of your community effort. This is the information you want to pass along to those in need. Make sure you store it in a way that makes it easy to keep updated, such as a spreadsheet. Excel or Google Sheets are both easy ways to allow others to contribute to data collection and curation. Plus, it helps you provide a little structure to the location data you’re collecting.

A basic community resource spreadsheet will include:

• A name of the place, something that helps others identify it
• The address, intersection, or other geographic description
• A short overview of what resources are available at this location — this is optional, but helpful for those browsing available resources

Your spreadsheet can include those three fields as column headers. Then each subsequent row is a single resource. For example, consider this list:

Name	Address	Description
Redwood Empire Food Bank	3990 Brickway Blvd., Santa Rosa, CA 95403	Accepts donations and provides free emergency food boxes
The Salvation Army	93 Stony Circle, Santa Rosa, CA 95401	Clothing and other necessities
Kaiser Permanente	401 Bicentennial Way Santa Rosa, CA 95403	Emergency and inpatient services
Sutter Health	30 Mark West Springs Rd, Santa Rosa, CA 95403	Access medical services via Mark West Springs Rd off of Hwy 101

Let’s say you have a list like this in a spreadsheet. You can highlight everything, including the headers, then copy and paste it into this map making tool to create a map like this:

View Disaster Relief Community Resource Map in a full screen map

As you find additional resources, or need to update existing ones, update your spreadsheet as your “source of truth.” Then simply copy-paste into the BatchGeo map to create your community resource map.

Help People Filter By Category

You may have noticed that the example resources are a mix of food, clothing, and medical services. Once you get more than a handful of locations, it can feel like a hodgepodge of places. You can categorize the resources available to make it easier to make it easier for users to see just what they’re interested in.

Go back to your spreadsheet and add another column for “category.” Here’s how you might expand the previous sample resources:

Name	Address	Description	Category
Redwood Empire Food Bank	3990 Brickway Blvd., Santa Rosa, CA 95403	Accepts donations and provides free emergency food boxes	Donations
The Salvation Army	93 Stony Circle, Santa Rosa, CA 95401	Clothing and other necessities	Donations
Kaiser Permanente	401 Bicentennial Way Santa Rosa, CA 95403	Emergency and inpatient services	Medical
Sutter Health	30 Mark West Springs Rd, Santa Rosa, CA 95403	Access medical services via Mark West Springs Rd off of Hwy 101	Medical

When you use the data in this updated spreadsheet to create a map, you’ll get something different:

View Disaster Relief Map with Categories in a full screen map

First, note the different colors of the icons. The donation sites are now visually separate from the medical facilities. Further, at the bottom of the map, you can choose only to see one or the other. Now you’re helping someone find the exact resource they need.

Of course, with four locations and two categories, it’s only minimally helpful. This magnifies when there are dozens or hundreds of resources. You can also include multiple types of categories. Using the BatchGeo grouping feature, any data in your spreadsheet becomes a potential filter field.

Promote Your Community Resource

Your map of community resources is now a resource itself! Just as word of mouth is the best way to spread the ways a community is ready to help each other, use those same channels to let everyone know about your map.

Share on Social Media

Use Twitter, Facebook, and neighborhood message boards to get the word out! You can link directly to BatchGeo maps and know they’ll work on any device. Our maps are mobile-optimized while still looking great on larger screens, using the same link.

Embed in Other Websites

If you already maintain a community resource on the web, add maps within your existing site. No need to link off to a different site for the map, bring the map into your site.

When you create your map, you’ll receive an email with a special code to embed your map. If you have access to add HTML to your site, you’ll be able to use this to include the map seamlessly within your other content.