Getting Started with the PowerPoint Writer: Maps

Introduction

We can add basic maps to our PowerPoint. With the PowerPoint Writer and Styler being new, there are some limitations to how your maps turn out. If you require a more complex map, you can rasterize your map using various transformers or the MapnikRasterizer and then use the Image Slide Type. This tutorial is part five of six and will demonstrate how to add multiple map layers to a slide.

Downloads

PowerpointWriter-5-Maps-Begin.fmwt Beginning workspace

PowerpointWriter-5-Maps-Complete.fmwt Completed workspace

public-streets.zip Street shapefile

Instructions

1. Open Starting Workspace

Open PowerPointWriter-5-Maps-Begin.fmwt, which is the starting workspace for this tutorial, or continue where you left off in the previous tutorial.

2. Add Road Lines

We want to overlay our food vendors on a roadmap to show where they are in relation to each other. First, we will add the road networks and clean up the attributes. Add an Esri Shapefile reader to the canvas and browse to the public-streets.shp dataset.

3. Clip Road Network

The road network contains all of the roads in Vancouver, which if we added to our PowerPoint as is, it would become very overwhelming. Let’s clip the roads to the buffered area. Add a Clipper transformer to the canvas. Connect the Clipper input port to the Buffered output port on the Bufferer and the Clippee input port to the public-streets feature type. In the parameters enable Merge Attributes.

4. Clean Up Attributes

Let’s clean up the attributes. Add an AttributeManager transformer to the canvas and connect it to the Inside output port on the Clipper. In the parameters rename MainArea to District and hblock to StreetName. Then remove streetuse and _clipped.

5. Join Lines

One last step before we can add the street food vendors, we need to join the road line segments together to clean up the labeling at the end. The PowerPointStyler labels each road segment as if it was a separate road, so we will need to merge all the roads of the same name together. To do this, let’s use the LineCombiner transformer. Add a LineCombiner to the canvas and connect it to the AttributeManager that is connected to the Clipper. In the parameters, set the Combine on Attributes to StreetName.

6. Create Polygons from Points

For our street food vendor points to show up we need to make them bigger, a way to do this is by using a 2DEllipseReplacer transformer, which replaces geometry with a 2D ellipse polygon. Add a 2DEllipseReplacer and connect it to the AttributeManager that is connected to the SpatialFilter.

In the parameters, set the Primary Axis and the Secondary Axis to both 0.00003, this value is using the LL84 coordinate system. If you want larger street food vendors, increase this value.

7. Connect to a PowerPointStyler

Now we can create our map slides. Add a PowerPointStyler to the canvas and connect it to both the LineCombiner and the 2DEllipseReplacer.

In the parameters, change the Slide Type to Map Slide, then set the Slide Subtype to Map with Caption. For Title call it Food Vendor Locations and for the Caption set it to the District attribute. Next for Label Parameters, set the Label Text to the StreetName attribute, you can change the color and font if you wish. Expand Fill Parameters and change the Foreground Color to a bright color. For this example, a lime green color is set.

For Feature Handling, set the Create Slide From to Multiple Features and then set the Slide Group ID to District. This will create a different slide for each District and will use all of the features in that group. If you left this as Single Features, a slide will be created for every single line feature, which results in a lot of slides.

8. Connect to the writer

Connect the PowerPointStyler_15 to the PowerPoint Writer and run the translation. You can continue to use this workspace in the next tutorial if you wish. We will be starting with a new workspace.

The map output slide with both roads and the street food vendors viewed in Microsoft PowerPoint

Note: If when you open the completed PowerPoint and it is in Master View. Click the "Close Master View" button on the ribbon.

Data Attribution

The data used here originates from open data made available by the City of Vancouver, British Columbia. It contains information licensed under the Open Government License - Vancouver.