How to connect your choropleth map to Google Sheets

With Datawrapper, you can connect your charts, tables, and choropleth maps to a Google Sheet.

The up-to-date numbers will be pulled from the Google Sheets spreadsheet every time you open the visualization in Datawrapper. 

👉 Note that you need to publish your visualization again to make the changes appear in the embedded visualization. To create visualizations that update automatically every time the dataset changes, read our article "How to create live-updating choropleth maps".

Connecting your visualization to a Google Sheet is useful to clearly separate the data editing and the data visualization process. For example, an editor in your organization could update the numbers, while the graphics team prepares the visualization. 

This article explains how to connect your choropleth map to Google Sheet.

1

First, create a choropleth map with Datawrapper. To do so, go to app.datawrapper.de/create/map, select Choropleth map and then choose or upload the map you want to fill with your data. To learn more about how to create choropleth maps, visit our article "How to create a choropleth map".

2

Click Proceed to go to step 2: Add your data. Now scroll all the way to the bottom until you find the option to Connect Google Sheet (if you don't find it, make sure you're in the Upload tab):

3

Now, Datawrapper asks you to enter the link to your Google Sheets spreadsheet. 

To enter a valid link, you need to activate Link sharing in your spreadsheet. To do so, go to your Google Sheet and click on the big green Share button in the top right: 

A pop-up window will open. Here, select Change to anyone with the link at the bottom, and copy the link. Once you changed the permission to "anyone with the link", you can also simply copy the URL. That's especially useful if you've created multiple sheets: The URL will always link to your currently selected sheet.

4

Paste the URL to your Google Sheet into the text field. If you followed these instructions, you should see a green checkmark:

👉 Make sure that your dataset contains the correct spelling of the map keys (e.g. "Czechia" instead of "Czech Republic" for our world map). To prepare the CSV, you can download a table with all the possible keys for your map in the second tab, Match.

Click Connect and you'll see your data appear in the table to the right. 

Note that you can't make any changes to connected data. You can read what data you linked to, but you can't edit it. We recommend editing your data in Google Sheet. (To see the changes in the table or then later in step 3: Visualize after you update the Google Sheet, you might need to refresh the browser page that runs Datawrapper.)

4

And that's it! Now you can proceed to step 3: Visualize. To learn how to tweak the colors, color key, title, etc. of your choropleth map, visit our article "Customizing your choropleth map".