The traditional choropleth maps have now become ubiquitous, and at times not as revealing, as other forms of visualizations may tell a more compelling story from the data provided. This tutorial takes you through the steps of importing a US County shapefile into Google Earth (pro), and extruding the counties based on a given attribute.
Step 1: Prepare your shapefile
- Download the US County shapefile and extract it onto a local folder
- Launch Google Earth
- Go to File, Import…
- Navigate to the folder of the extracted county shapefile and make sure to select ESRI Shape (*.shp) from the drop down menu next to the file name
- select the counties.shp file, and click “Open“
- Click “Import All” for the Data Import warning popup
- Click “Yes” to apply a template
- Notice the 4 tabs: Name, Color, Icon, Height. Click on Name, and set the name field to “NAME”
- Select the Color tab
- Select “set color from field”
- Select color field “HISPANIC”
- Select a start and end color of you choice (I recommend a diverging color scheme to contrast the lows vs the highs)
- Set the Number of buckets to 6
- Change the bucket values to 100, 1000, 10000, 100000, 500000
- Select the Height tab
- Select Set height from field
- Select height filed HISPANIC
- Mapping method: Continuous
- Scaling factor: about 0.5
- Click OK and turn on the layer
Thanks and Thanks. You are really a legend. I am halfway close in creating my 3D Data map. God Bless You for this tutorial
Hi. I was hoping to follow the tutorial, but am unable to download the US County shapefile. Do you have any thoughts about what I might be doing wrong? Thanks!
Hello Joanna! You can find the county shapefile here:
https://gis.ucla.edu/geodata/dataset/counties