Pitney Bowes MapInfo Professional - Manual (Page 260)

MapInfo Professional in Action
Since you have all the tools you need to make effective and useful maps, it is time to talk about what
makes a map effective and useful. Whatever you need your map to say, whether it is to convey information,
calculate distances between health care providers and their patients, or get a count of the number of
customers that live within a given radius of an outlet location, MapInfo Professional can help you do that.
By making selections from your table, you can extract information from sets and subsets of your data or
see patterns and distributions, getting answers to such questions as: Which of my customers bought
more than $5000 of equipment? Which of my customers is located within a 200 mile radius of my
warehouse? Which of my customers bought more than $5000 of equipment and is located within a 200
mile radius of my warehouse? For more on selecting, see
Selecting Your Data in MapInfo Professional ,
and Querying Your Data in MapInfo Professional .
MapInfo Professional refers to this grouping of like information as thematic mapping.
• For an example, see Can You Give Me an Example in the Help System.
Using Thematic Mapping to Analyze Information
Thematic mapping is the process of enhancing your map according to a particular theme. At the
cornerstone of the theme is the data in your table. Themes represent your data with shades of color, fill
patterns, symbols, bar and pie charts, and grids.
With MapInfo Professional, you create different thematic maps by assigning these colors, patterns, or
symbols to map objects according to specific values in your table. MapInfo Professional's bar and pie
charts allow you to make data comparisons for each record. Grids allow you to see continuous change
of your data across an area.
The thematic map feature uses a wizard made up of a series of three dialog boxes to help you choose
the type of thematic map you want, the table(s) and fields that will be used to construct the map, and a
variety of options to customize your map.
MapInfo Professional 12.5 260
MapInfo Professional in Action