Styling the Data

Reviewing the data

If you want to review the original data, you can open the attribute table which contains all the data about the layer. Select the schools layer > right click > open attribute table. Below is what you should see- same as the spreadsheet data.

Styling the data

We can style the data by using the style tab functions. Styling the data helps finding answers you might ask your data. Here we want to clearly show how population varies between schools.

• To style, we can use graduated symbols- they vary in size depending on the values in the attribute. Close the attribute table > double click the schools layer > select style.

• Click the Advanced drop down arrow at the right below corner of the window, Click on the size scale field. You will notice a list of the attributes: Ea Region, Current EA, Eastings, Northings and Population.

All these attributes have numerical values which you can style using graduated symbols, but what we want to explore is the variation in population.

• Select Population, change the unit size to 0.05mm and Click OK. You can zoom in to take a closer look at the map.

• You can change the name of the layer: right click the layer and select Rename, type the new name as : school population. Play around with the color, symbols, transparency and size tools in the window shown below.

The final map shows the population in the schools using graduated symbols.

The map we just created seems not to communicate much: we can give it more context by adding other layers like, the roads or building layer or you can add name labels to the schools so that you can see the names. That will be the topic of a future module.