Category: mapping

Around the world, employees struggle with their work-life balance—especially now that many companies have realized the benefits of remote work. Paid vacation days and public holidays certainly help the issue, though paid time off varies greatly.

Some countries have laws providing ample minimum annual paid vacation and holiday days. But others offer none or leave it up to employers.

Which countries offer the most PTO? And how do they compare to those with the least? Let’s find out on the map below, which shows paid vacation days, paid public holidays, and the total combined, including UK vacation days and vacation time in Europe.

View Paid vacation days by country in a full screen map

Countries with Most Vacation Time

Countries’ paid vacation days range from zero (seven countries) to 31 days (just one). These are the minimum mandatory vacation days for an employee with one year of service to the same employer. Let’s start on a positive note with the countries that offer the most paid vacation days:

• Andorra – 31 paid vacation days per year
• Algeria – 30
• Bahrain – 30
• Burkina Faso – 30
• Equatorial Guinea – 30
• Kuwait – 30
• Panama – 30
• Peru – 30
• United Arab Emirates – 30
• Malta – 27

These ten countries offer at least 27 paid vacation days, though many more—like Andorra—provide up to 31 days each year. Andorra even goes so far as to mandate that one period of leave must last two weeks or more, to allow an uninterrupted rest period for employees.

In addition to Andorra, employees in Malta are entitled to quite a few paid vacation days, making the average vacation time in Europe (at least, Southern Europe) seem impressive.

However, more countries located in the Persian Gulf’s Arab states provide the most paid vacation days: Bahrain, Kuwait, and United Arab Emirates tie for the second-highest number. And it’s the same case for Africa’s Algeria, Burkina Faso, and Equatorial Guinea.

Ironically, while Burkina Faso boasts 30 days of paid vacation days, nearby Nigeria offers employees far less PTO, as we’ll see below.

Zero PTO Countries

When it comes to the least paid vacation days, seven countries have zero mandatory days:

• Kiribati
• Marshall Islands
• Micronesia
• Nauru
• Palau
• Tonga
• United States

The U.S. certainly stands out among the rest of these smaller island countries. Notably, Tonga’s government is working to create laws for paid vacation time. But there’s still no federal or state statutory minimum paid vacation (or paid public holidays) in the United States.

Instead, paid leave is at the discretion of the employers. Reportedly, 77% of private employers offer paid vacation to their employees, though some employers still offer no vacation at all. The average number of paid vacation days for full-time employees is 10 days after 1 year of service, 14 days after 5 years, 17 days after 10 years, and 20 days after 20 years.

And while not zero, Taiwanese employees only earn 3 paid vacation days each year. Similarly, China, Nigeria, and the Philippines offer just five. Now let’s see how many countries provide paid public holidays.

Places for Plenty of Paid Public Holidays

In addition to vacation days, public holidays are also often paid. Of the countries that mandate paid public holidays (10 offer none), the average is 12.21 days. Let’s see which places are home to the most paid holidays on the following table.

Country	Paid public holidays
Cambodia	27
Iran	27
Lebanon	22
Sri Lanka	20
Argentina	19
Azerbaijan	19
Suriname	18
Colombia	18
Hong Kong	17
Tanzania	17

Cambodia and Iran’s 27 paid public holidays are more than double the average. Along with Cambodia, employees in two more Asian countries (Sri Lanka and Hong Kong) can take paid holidays in the double-digits. Moreover, the three countries in South America (Argentina, Suriname, and Colombia) boast similar benefits.

For the countries with the least paid public holidays (hint: the U.S. makes another appearance), select the “Paid public holidays” group on the map and opt for the “0” range.

You can also see the Total paid leave (paid vacation days and paid public holidays combined) when you check out that group. See what insights map grouping can offer you when you make your own map at batchgeo.com.

Google famously wants to organize all the world’s information—and there’s a lot out there. You could spend many hours exploring just Wikipedia, which is a treasure trove of facts, figures, and miscellany. It’s no surprise when you come across a data table that piques your interest. In fact, there is a lot of open data trapped in HTML tables.

Often, you’ll want to take your research a step further and save the table to an ideal place for storing, manipulating, and analyzing data: a spreadsheet. But copy and pasting each row or even entire tables can be time-consuming, especially if there are multiple tables on the same topic you want to capture.

Instead, you can make better use of your time when you opt for tools that all but automate the task of grabbing data from the web and transferring it to Excel or Google Sheets.

In this post, we’ll highlight a few ways to capture data from the web. You can import external web data right in Excel, or use a browser extension to save time when grabbing web data. So let’s get started.

Get External Data to Excel: Web Import

Excel is the favorite spreadsheet tool of many for data visualization and analysis. But what if there’s data you want to manipulate that’s not yet in your spreadsheet? Whether it’s a table from an external source like the web or any other external source, the spreadsheet tool makes it easy to automatically import data into Excel.

While this method doesn’t work, when the option is available, it’s one of the easiest ways of importing into Excel.

1. Navigate to the Data tab in Excel and click Get Data
2. Select the data source you wish to import (From Web for this tutorial)
3. Paste in the URL of your desired webpage and press the arrow near the specific table
   you want to import
4. Click Import and identify a new Excel workbook or existing one

Other than pulling from the web, you can do the same in Excel From Access, From Text, From Other Sources, From SQL Server, or From XML Data Import—depending on your device. But for those without this Excel option, you can still copy a table to Excel or another spreadsheet, too.

Browser Extensions Make It Easy to Copy a Table from Website to Excel

No one wants to manually copy and paste rows and columns of data to a spreadsheet. Even if you can do so with an entire table, there might be several related tables you also want.

To copy one or more web tables, you’ll want a web extension like Table Capture or plug in to help you export HTML table to Excel. There’s often a free version of the most helpful browser extensions.

Free:

• Copy table data to the clipboard
• Export table to Google Sheets
• Edit table data before exporting

We find the above free options suitable for our data collecting needs, most commonly copying the table data to the clipboard and pasting it into our preferred spreadsheet tool: Google Sheets vs Excel: 3 Reasons Google Is the Supreme Spreadsheet Tool.

But the availability of the Pro version is useful for those with the following use cases:

• Download table as an Excel (.xlsx) file
• Download table as a CSV file
• Screenshot table (saves as a .png image)
• Export table to Office 365
• Copy to clipboard as Markdown
• Publish and share this table

In addition to the varying gathering methods, Table Capture Chrome enables you to Select all of the tables on a given page or Clear selection. Preview helps assure you’ve chosen the right table. Here are step-by-step directions on how to use it:

1. Add the Table Capture Chrome extension
2. Navigate the webpage you wish to pull a data table from
3. Click the extension in the upper right-hand corner of your browser
4. Identify your desired table
5. Click the icon that represents the action you want to take
6. Paste to your sheet if necessary

And there you have it! Once your data is in your spreadsheet, you’ll want to adequately prepare it for a map by removing links and other data clean-up tasks.

Gain Access to Data Blocked from Capture

For the occasional website that prevents you from easily grabbing their data with a browser extension that copies tables, there are, of course, workarounds.

But before resorting to an add-on like Enable Copy or Absolute Enable Right Click & Copy, be sure to check the site’s terms and conditions. Many have their reasons for not making their data accessible.

If you ultimately decide to bypass them, it’s always better to do so when you’re working on a project for your personal use rather than marketing or other commercial use.

Map Your Newly Gathered Data

No matter the source, we’ve shown how easy it is to grab any desired information with the help of different tools. Now the only thing left to do is map your data, going from this:

To an easier to visualize map:

View Mapped List of Captive Orcas in a full screen map

Of course, there are several ways to do so (we listed popular methods in our Introduction to Map Making on the Web. But perhaps the easiest way to map your data is with a web-based geocoder like ours. So let’s take a look at the next steps.

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

Get started mapping your data today with BatchGeo.

There’s not much that’s more essential than the air we breathe. But our constant inhaling can have negative health effects if we don’t live in one of the cleanest cities in America. While air pollution exists almost everywhere in this post-Industrial Revolution world, it’s often most widespread in well-populated metropolitan areas.

Individual pollutants, such as ozone levels (smog) and particle pollution—or soot—reach the highest levels in the air of the most polluted cities in the US, as the map below shows. In addition to the two most common pollutants, the map contains other types of air pollution like carbon monoxide and lead, along with nitrogen and sulfur dioxide.

View Outdoor Air Quality in the U.S. in a full screen map

Use the map to review the cities with the highest and lowest pollutants, including the 4th highest daily max 8-hour average of ozone levels in the year or the mean PM2.5 weighted by calendar quarter for the year. Or, read on to see what we’ve discovered in the EPA’s data.

Smoggiest Cities in California & More

While there are many air pollutants (carbon monoxide, lead, nitrogen oxides, and sulfur oxides), two types are more common, especially in cities. One of the most widespread is ozone pollution, otherwise known as smog.

Breathing in smog irritates and inflames the lungs. Unfortunately, more smog or ozone can be found in the air of the following metropolitan areas than anywhere else in the U.S.

• Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA – 0.125 ppm
• Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA – 0.124
• Bakersfield, CA – 0.101
• Fresno, CA – 0.09
• Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale, AZ – 0.087
• Denver-Aurora-Lakewood, CO – 0.087
• Sacramento–Roseville–Arden-Arcade, CA – 0.086
• Madera, CA – 0.085
• Oxnard-Thousand Oaks-Ventura, CA – 0.085
• Hanford-Corcoran, CA – 0.084

The EPA maintains standards for ozone pollutants and measures a couple of different ways. The results are described in parts per million (ppm). To avoid anomalies, the EPA looks at the 4th highest daily max 8-hour average in the year and sets the standard at 0.07 ppm. All of the top 10 are well beyond that mark and a whopping 70 U.S. cities are above that EPA standard.

Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, California area is the dirtiest city in America, at least where smog is concerned. But this isn’t the only Golden State location with abysmally high ozone levels. Home to eight of the top locations, including the four highest, California is one of the most polluted states in the US—and it’s also in the country’s dirtiest region.

Continuing the trend in the western U.S., the Denver-Aurora-Lakewood area ranks high in smog. As does the more southern of the same region (the Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale area). Breathing in either smog or soot can increase the risk of lower newborn birth weight, so let’s move on to the second most common air pollutant.

US Cities with the Most Soot in the Air

When it comes to particle pollution (PM2.5, also known as soot), the EPA recommends no more than a 12 ug/m3 mean weighted by calendar quarter for the year. However, 23 cities across the U.S. surpass that—and ten cities’ particles are at far greater levels than the EPA advises, as you’ll see on the table below.

City	State	PM2.5 Weighted Annual Mean (ug/m3)
Eugene	OR	23.2
Bakersfield	CA	22.5
San Diego-Carlsbad	CA	20.5
Fresno	CA	20.3
Hanford-Corcoran	CA	19.9
Madera	CA	19.1
Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale	AZ	17.2
Sacramento–Roseville–Arden-Arcade	CA	16.1
Chico	CA	16
Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim	CA	15.9

Once again, Californian cities dominate the charts. Eight of the sootiest are located in California, including many of the top smoggiest cities we mentioned earlier (Bakersfield, Fresno, Hanford-Corcoran, Madera, Sacramento–Roseville–Arden-Arcade, and Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim), along with new additions like San Diego-Carlsbad and Chico.

But none of these cities are #1. That title belongs to Eugene, Oregon, which is nearly double the EPA’s standards.

Find Cities with the Best Air Quality

On a higher note, there are also cities with air quality levels far better than the EPA’s recommendations on the map. Take ozone, of which Urban Honolulu, Hawaii and Santa Cruz-Watsonville, California have the best levels, .045 and .048 ppm, respectively.

The ozone levels of Keene, New Hampshire, Bellingham, Washington, and Claremont-Lebanon, New Hampshire-Vermont are similarly high (.050 ppm). Meanwhile, Minot, North Dakota’s .051 ppm is nearly as good, along with eight cities of .052 ppm, which you can find on the map.

The same goes for particle pollution, which the EPA advises no more than 12 ug/m3:

• Manchester-Nashua, NH – 3.00 ug/m3
• Dickinson, ND – 3.60
• Rock Springs, WY – 3.60
• Wilmington, NC – 3.70
• Urban Honolulu, HI – 3.90
• Laconia, NH – 4.10
• Claremont-Lebanon, NH-VT – 4.30
• Corning, NY – 4.40
• Brainerd, MN – 4.40
• Cambridge, MD – 4.40
• Brookings, SD – 4.40

You’ll notice Honolulu, Hawaii and Claremont-Lebanon, New Hampshire have some of the better levels of both smog and soot.

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That’s it for the cities with the best and worst air pollution in the U.S. Switching gears from air to recycling, be sure to check out the Most and Least Environmentally Friendly Countries.