Category: mapping

Your relationship has had a lot of firsts. Of course, there’s your first meeting, first date, and first kiss. Depending on how long you’ve been together, you may also have marriage or even child-related milestones to celebrate.

Remembering these milestones is the idea behind those maps of your relationship that make for popular gifts around Valentine’s Day. And while those certainly are thoughtful tokens to hang on the wall, we’re in the digital age.

We want to show you how to make an online map of your milestones, which starts by jotting down the most important events of your relationship.

Jot Down the Important Events of Your Relationship

You certainly have an idea of the important milestones in your relationship—you were there, after all. But have you ever written them down?

More than just for posterity’s sake, a spreadsheet of the most important events throughout your years together will help you make your map. So go ahead and note your relationship milestones in a column within Excel or Google Sheets.

Some ideas to consider:

• Your first meeting
• First date
• First “I love you”
• Engagement
• Marriage

You might also wish to add when you first moved in together, your first vacation, or even your first fight (which may have occurred on the same day as one of the prior two events), among other events specific to your relationship.

But beyond noting the type of milestone, there are a few more details you’ll want to include.

Add Locations & Dates

In addition to writing down your milestones, you need to note a few more things about these events: locations and dates.

Each of your relationship’s moments occurred somewhere. If it’s a common enough location, such as a landmark (i.e. Library Quad, California State University, Sacramento, CA), you can include that in its own column, along with city, state, and optionally country all in separate columns. The same goes for specific locations, like business names (i.e. or Grumpy Mule Coffee, Sacramento, CA).

Beyond that, you’ll want to include addresses (i.e. 5901 Newman Ct)—though locations aren’t the only additional data you should include.

It’s equally as useful to note the date of each event, though you’ll want to include each part in its own column (i.e. Day, Month, Year). Once that’s done, we can move on to the final part: making the map!

Map Your Milestones

View Your Relationship Milestones in a full screen map

With your milestones and their details collected, it’s time to map them. There are plenty of methods for map making on the web, including ArcGIS and the Google Maps API. But for an option that doesn’t require you to purchase expensive software (as with ArcGIS) or have any programming knowledge (Google Maps API), our web-based mapping tool might just be your best bet. That’s because all you’ll need to know how to do is copy and paste.

So let’s jump into it:

1. Open your spreadsheet of relationship milestones
2. Select (Ctrl+A or Cmd+A) and copy (Ctrl+C or Cmd+C) your data
3. Open your web browser and navigate to batchgeo.com
4. Click on the location data box with the example data in it, then paste (Ctrl+V or Cmd+V) your own data
5. Check to make sure you have the proper location data columns available by clicking “Validate and Set Options”
6. Select the proper location column from each drop-down
7. Click “Make Map” and watch as the geocoder performs its process

From there, you can choose your map’s base styles, along with the marker shapes, colors, and labels. Once you’re happy with your map, send the link to the one you love most.

The age when you can legally get behind the wheel differs around the world. While the most common driving age is 18, laws in many countries allow younger drivers on the road. In one province in Canada, even 14-year-olds can join the ranks of drivers. Can they even touch the pedals?!

Also different from place to place is when you can get your learner’s permit and begin driving with parental supervision. Moreover, driving age requirements also range depending on the type of vehicle, whether car, motorcycle, or moped. So let’s take a look at the differing driving ages on the map below, then continue for driving age insights.

View Driving Ages in a full screen map

Youngest Driving Age in the World

While many in the U.S. consider 16 the average age to obtain a driver’s license, it’s actually one of the younger age requirements. Over 120 countries proclaim 18 as their minimum age, yet many others have the same lower-than-average driving age as the U.S., as you’ll see below:

• 16 years old: American Samoa, Cameroon, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Guam, Isle of Man, Northern Mariana Islands, Saudi Arabia, United States*, Zambia, and Zimbabwe
• 16.5 years old: Australia
• 17 years old: Austria, Bahamas, Cayman Islands, Falkland Islands, Fiji, Georgia, Gibraltar, Guernsey, Guyana, Iceland, Indonesia, Ireland, Jersey, Malaysia, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Trinidad and Tobago, and the United Kingdom
• 17.5 years old: New Zealand

Ten other countries join the U.S. with the youngest driving age of 16, including three Oceanic (American Samoa, Guam, and Northern Mariana Islands) and African (Cameroon, Zambia, and Zimbabwe) countries each.

Of course, the minimum driving age varies state by state in the U.S. For example, you can obtain an unrestricted license at 16 in four states: Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota. Meanwhile, 13 states only offer the same license to 18-year-olds, including Washington, Texas, and Florida.

Rules for driving in Australia are complex and varied. The minimum age to obtain a car or motorcycle learner license which allows driving under supervision is 15 years and 9 months, in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT). All other states and territories require learner drivers to be 16 years of age or older. Driving unsupervised by progressing to a provisional license is possible after 12 months, with minimum supervised hours (including nighttime driving) required in the form of a logbook. The exception to this is the Northern Territory, where learner drivers can progress to a provisional license after 6 months, without the need for a driving test or logbook.

On the other hand, the oldest minimum driving age is 23. That law is from Niger, even though most African countries mandate 18. Nearby, the driving age in Kuwait is 18… yet being a non-Kuwaiti raises that to 21, the same as the drinking age in seven countries. Even so, in many countries, teens can begin learning to drive much earlier.

Where 14-Year-Olds Can Get a Learner’s Permit

The lowest age of full licensure may be 16, but the minimum learner’s permit driving age can be even lower. Some drivers can be as young as 14 (with parental supervision), as you’ll find in the table below.

Country	Minimum learner’s permit age
Canada	14
United States	14
El Salvador	15
France	15
Mexico	15
Saudi Arabia	15
Austria	15.5
Northern Mariana Islands	15.5
Australia	15.75

Some parts of both Canada and the U.S. allow 14-year-olds to get learner’s permits. In Canada’s case, only one province (Alberta) has this low age. Meanwhile, Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Nunavut add a year to that (15). As for the rest of the Canadian provinces, it’s 16 to get a supervised permit.

As for what state can you drive at 14, it’s just a handful of places. Only six states (Alaska, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, North Dakota, and South Dakota) mark the start of young drivers’ journeys at 14.

Note the rest of the countries with the youngest on the map above. Or check out the 14 countries with the oldest age requirements for a permit (17). Otherwise, we’re moving on to other types of vehicles.

Other Vehicle Types: Mopeds and Motorcycles

Car driving ages, unrestricted and supervised aside, there are other types of vehicles, such as mopeds and motorcycles. While both are motorbikes, a moped has a smaller engine, usually 50cc or less, often making the age requirement less than that of larger-engined motorcycles.

Twenty-two countries have established moped driving ages, the lowest of which is 14 in Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Switzerland, and Poland. Meanwhile, 24 countries put a limit on riding motorcycles, with Thailand having the youngest age at 15.

Check out the rest of the moped and motorcycle driving ages on the map, when you sort the map.

View What You Want, Hide What You Don’t

In your Excel file or other spreadsheet, you typically have more data than just the location column. When you map that data on the web, our geocoder intelligently finds the best home for the remaining data. Where useful, your columns may be suggested for grouping. Users of your map will be able to select only the markers that meet certain requirements, filtering out the rest. Groups can be combined to zero in on very specific results, giving you insight into the story behind the map.

For another example of how grouping can illuminate new insights into your data, check out Voting Age Around the World.

When your Excel spreadsheet is full of rows and columns, it can get difficult to browse. You use it to store important data, from business revenue to sales or customer information to… who knows, maybe a list of locations. To get the most from your spreadsheets, you want to be able to connect each piece of data with key labels. None of your rows upon rows of data are quite as important as your header row, which can help keep your data organized.

In this post, we’ll show you how to keep your most important data visible while you browse your spreadsheet. Read on to see how to freeze rows (like a header) in Excel, along with some more Excel row tricks, including how to automatically re-size rows to fit your data. Let’s get started.

Add & Freeze Header Row(s)

Excel can hold over a million rows of data. While this is great for anyone with big datasets, it also makes it easier to forget the value of row 123,456. It’s a huge time-saver to be able to see that header row—or any other important rows—at all times. Thankfully, you can modify the worksheet so the first row is always visible when you scroll the worksheet down. To add and then freeze a header row in Excel:

1. Right-click on Row 1 and click Insert
2. A new row will appear above your data where you can type your header in each new cell
   • For example: Customer, Total Sales, Address, City, and State
3. Navigate to the View tab and select Freeze Top Row

Wherever you scroll, your header row will remain in place. To freeze more than just the first row, follow the steps above. The only change is to select the row beneath the last row you’d like to freeze (i.e., we wanted to freeze the first two rows, so we selected row three). Then, opt for Freeze Panes instead in the View tab to freeze all of the rows above the row you selected.

To freeze a column, select Freeze First Column. For multiple columns, click on the column to the right of where you’d like to freeze, then select Freeze Panes. Now we can move on to another column-related trick that also helps us better understand our data.

Automatically Re-Size Columns to Fit Your Data

Even with your header row(s) and columns in place, getting the gist of your data at a glance can be hard when some data points naturally take up more space in a cell. For example, it would be nice to see the full name of each Customer without needing to click into the cell. It’s immensely helpful to change the width of your columns so that the contents automatically fit within the column, which we can do in Excel. Follow these steps:

1. Select all of the columns you’d like to re-size
2. Double-click one of the lines that separates the columns

Every column you selected will automatically be re-sized to fit the longest data point, allowing you to see it all.

If you only care to see part of a cell’s data (such as a Customer’s first name), you can also manually re-size individual columns by once again clicking the line that separates each column and dragging it larger or smaller. For now, let’s move on to one final thing you can do to help you better understand the relationship between your data.

Visualize Your Data with a Map

We’ve gone from a spreadsheet with no headers and columns that don’t fit the data to a sheet with clear headers that remain at the top no matter how far down you scroll. Let’s take it one step further by mapping our data to truly see the relationship between our data’s location like address, city, or state and the rest of its columns.

View December Sales in a full screen map

You’ll be able to see your location data (think addresses, cities, states, ZIP codes, countries, geographic coordinates, and even landmarks) plotted on a customizable Google Map. Any additional data (in our case, Total sales) will automatically be grouped together, enabling you to filter the map by only what you want to see. Whether that’s the highest or lowest sales or any other insights, is up to you. Here’s how to do it:

1. Open your spreadsheet
2. Select (Ctrl+A or Cmd+A) and copy (Ctrl+C or Cmd+C) your data
3. Open your web browser and navigate to batchgeo.com
4. Click on the location data box with the example data in it, then paste (Ctrl+V or Cmd+V) your own data
5. Check to make sure you have the proper location data columns available by clicking “Validate and Set Options”
6. Select the proper location column from each drop-down
7. Click “Make Map” and watch as the geocoder performs its process

Map your location data today at batchgeo.com.