May round-up of InstantAtlas stories

Welcome to the latest edition of the InstantAtlas blog news – our monthly round-up of projects where InstantAtlas software solutions are used to map and present statistics in interactive dynamic reports and profiles.

In this edition we review two case studies from Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council and Warwickshire County Council a forthcoming live webinar from the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services, plus we introduce a new offering from InstantAtlas called the ‘Report Creation Service’.

Tailored to your needs – The InstantAtlas Report Creation Service

We make no apology for the fact that everyone working for InstantAtlas is excited about what they do – whether it is developing software that helps you to present data in an interactive easy-to-understand way, or helping you get the most from InstantAtlas. So when someone asks us for advice, or help with a project we get a real buzz. With that in mind we thought it would be helpful to explain exactly what we can do for you – especially when you find yourself short on time, resource and budget so you know where to come.

What does InstantAtlas Report Creation Service offer?

The InstantAtlas support team provides a service for anyone who needs a helping hand with report creation with InstantAtlas Desktop. This includes:

• Map data preparation
• Dynamic report publishing
• Report design and branding
• Preparation and loading of statistical data
• Performance tweaks
• Report deployment

Pierre, Head InstantAtlas Support, says: “We can help support with any aspect of report production with InstantAtlas Desktop. Whether it’s filling gaps in a multi-faceted project, or providing report creation throughout from start to finish, we have the experience to help make it a success.”

Learn more

Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council

‘Using map presentation software to ensure services are delivered in the most effective way at Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council’ 

Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council covers nine towns situated between Manchester and the Peak District. The council places great emphasis on partnership and has a culture of working closely with local organisations.

The council is part of the Tameside Strategic Partnership which brings together a diverse set of partners from the public, private, voluntary and community sectors to agree key aims, objectives and priorities for Tameside. The partnership includes the police, health service, Tameside College and Greater Manchester Probation Trust. To help the partnership get a better understanding of local needs, a Partnership Information Portal has been developed.

Getting started

Jody Stewart, Principal Policy Officer, Corporate Performance and Improvement at the council says that for many years it produced a publication called Quality of Life which included selected statistics about the borough. “The challenge was that by the time it was published the statistics were out of date,” says Jody. “So we decided to move towards an online data observatory that would allow people to access up-to-date information on a variety of topics and track this data over time.”

 

Read the full article

Warwickshire County Council

‘Creating dynamic online reports for needs assessment at Warwickshire County Council’

Warwickshire Observatory is the home for information and intelligence about Warwickshire and its people. Its aim is to be a centre of excellence in research, data collection and analysis to support evidence-based policy-making across the public sector in Warwickshire.

The observatory undertakes work for, and in partnership with, a wide range of customers across the county council and other partner organisations. Paul Larcombe is Corporate GIS Manager and he explains that although the observatory has used GIS software in the past, it has only recently developed a local information system (LIS).

“We found that we were getting more queries from the public and it was taking time to find answers so we decided that an LIS would help people find the answers themselves,” he says.

Getting started

The team looked at a range of suppliers but decided to go with interactive map building software from InstantAtas which was bought in tandem with Coventry City Council. A successful funding bid meant the team was able to start building the LIS and this also covered the purchase of OCSI data packs.

“The LIS is a still a work in progress but the focus to date has been on desktop dynamic reports and we have a range of live content supporting the JSNA (Joint Strategic Needs Assessment),” says Paul.

Read the full article

Forthcoming North American Public Health Webinar with Charles J. Utermohle, PhD

Our latest North American public health webinar in June will be presented by Charlies J. Utermohle, Data Analyst, Division of Public Health, Alaska Department of Health and Social Services. Charles works in the Section of Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion within the Alaska Division of Public Health. His responsibilities include statistical analysis of the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System for adults and the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System for middle and high school students.

Webinar Topic
‘Automating InstantAtlas production using Access Data Manager’

In the webinar Charles will discuss how the InstantAtlas Access Data Manager can be used to prepare large datasets using the example of the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS).

Charles’ presentation will focus how Access Data Manager can be used with any dataset where there are too many variables to be efficiently handled in the Excel Data Manager.

Learn more about this webinar

InstantAtlas Essentials #26

‘Changing Visibility of Components Depending on Indicator Selection in HTML reports’

In this video we describe how to change the visibility of components on an indicator basis for HTML reports. This video compliments our Support document ‘How to Change the Visibility of Components Depending on Indicator Selection in InstantAtlas Reports’ which can be found in the Desktop Support area of My InstantAtlas.

YouTube version

InstantAtlas dedicated streaming server version

New InstantAtlas Essentials tutorial released – No. 26 ‘How to Change the Visibility of Components Depending on Indicator Selection in InstantAtlas HTML Reports’

Welcome to another InstantAtlas Essentials video for IA customers.

In this video Sara Fuller of the InstantAtlas support team describes how to change the visibility of components on an indicator basis for HTML reports. This video compliments the Support document ‘How to Change the Visibility of Components Depending on Indicator Selection in InstantAtlas Reports’, which can be found in the Desktop Support area of My InstantAtlas.

Click here to see Sara’s video tutorial - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JlYGvJ7YrQ&list=PL20D212C2D15B7907&index=26

If you cannot watch videos on YouTube then please click here to see the InstantAtlas Essentials tutorials on our video server.

New InstantAtlas Essentials Video – ‘Learn how to use the Single Map HTML 5 Template’

Hi! I’m Andrea Kirk of InstantAtlas Support and today I would like to introduce to you our new Single Map HTML5 Template.

We have created a video tutorial on the template plus you will also see a video transcript below for reference.

Enjoy!

The HTML5 reports work without any plug-ins and can therefore be used on Apple computers and mobile devices such as the iPad. Also, the reports are faster than their Flash equivalent and because HTML5 is an open standard, it is now much easier to integrate the HTML5 dynamic reports into your own website.

If you are already licensed for the Single Map Flash Template, you will automatically be able to use the HTML Edition of the Single Map template as well.

What you can see on the screen in front of you is an example report created with the HTML5 Single Map Template. The default look and feel is slightly different to what you may be used to from the Flash reports, however, you can style and design the report in an even more flexible way than it is possible within Flash.

There are some differences between the HTML5 reports and the Flash reports which I would like to highlight:

Most importantly the HTML5 reports are made to be touch screen friendly. For this reason there is no context menu or some people call it right-mouse-click menu included. The functions such as filtering to a certain selection or clearing the current selection can now be found either in the map toolbar or in the table footer. So for example if I select a few areas you can see that both buttons ‘Filter’ and ‘Clear’ become available. If I select ‘Filter’ the report filters the map and data to only include the areas I selected. Also the filter button now has a red cross which allows me to remove the filter again.

The footer of the Data Table also includes the notes icon for the last selected feature from which you can link to external resources. If there is no link set up for a certain feature, the notes icon will not appear.

You will also find that the Data Explorer works differently. You will not see the whole tree of the data structure but you can drill down from one level to the next. The top level shows all available base geographies. If a report only contains one base layer, the data explorer will show all available themes in the top level. From there you can now drill down to see the indicators of a certain theme and if an indicator has several time periods, you can see these when you click on the indicator. Clicking on a time period or an indicator without time periods will load the data into the report.

When you select a categoric indicator, the bar chart now shows one bar for each category with the height of the bar representing the number of map features which fall into this category.

Another enhancement is that you can now use Google Maps without needing an API key and besides the common layers Street map, Terrain, Hybrid and Satellite the reports also provides a Greyscale version of the Street map.

As you can see in this example, the component titles can now be dynamic, showing for example the selected theme, indicator and time period. You can configure table column headers in the same way.

There is a new component called Menu Bar which can be useful for functions which are less frequently used. In this example it contains Help, Print and Share links. The Print link opens the report in a new widow or tab resized to fit an A4 sheet of paper. If you wish to change this size you can adjust it using the plus and minus buttons. If you are happy with the size you can click the Printer icon to print the report.

Back in the main report window I would like to show you how easy it is to share this report with someone else. Clicking on the Share link in the Menu Bar I get two links. One allows me to send the link to this report in an email. The other one gives me the HTML code to embed this report into my own website without needing to have the report files on my web server. Simply copy and paste this code into the source code of your web page, adjust the width and height settings if you wish and this is all you have to do to embed the report.

You can also export the map and charts as an image. You can do this by clicking the export icon which appears at the top right hand corner of the component when you hover over it. A new browser tab opens which shows the map or chart as an image. You can now save it through the context menu of your browser.

If you click the export icon of the data table, you will not get an image. Instead you can see the data as a comma-separated list which can be copied and pasted into a .csv file or directly into Excel. If you select a subset of the table features, only the selected rows will be exported.

The data which is displayed in the report is served in JSON format. The file is called data.js and replaces the data.xml file which you may know from the Flash reports. The new Excel Data Manager add-in which is part of the InstantAtlas 6.6.0 release allows you to export your data either to XML or to JSON depending on the type of report you are creating.

The final improvement in the HTML5 Single Map template I would like to show you in the InstantAtlas Publisher. If you have been working with Flash templates in the past you know that styling and configuring map layers is not ideal since there are many settings of which some are needing to be set in the Publisher, some in the Designer or Style Editor; some only effect the Legend and some only effect the Map. This has become much more user friendly. All layer settings such as border width, border and fill colours, opacity, if the layer is visible on start-up, if the layer should show tool-tip or labels and so on can now be set in the Publisher in the properties of the layer. After the Publishing process you can change these settings by opening the files called map.js in a text editor. This file is structured very intuitively, so you won’t have any problems finding the setting to change.

I hope you like the new InstantAtlas Single Map HTML5 Template. If you have any questions on how it works or if you would like to suggest improvements, please do not hesitate to write an email to support@geowise.co.uk.

InstantAtlas Essentials Video | Advanced Pie Chart

Watch the latest InstantAtlas Essentials Video by the IA Support Team.

The Advanced Pie Chart component was newly introduced in Version 6.4.0 of InstantAtlas Desktop and gives you the possibility to show a breakdown of your data for one particular geography feature.

InstantAtlas Essentials Video | Using the InstantAtlas Server Module – Explorer

Watch the latest InstantAtlas Essentials Video by the IA Support Team. This week’s video is on the InstantAtlas Explorer module for InstantAtlas Server.

What is the Explorer module?

The Explorer Module allows users to explore the contents of the system. The Explorer module also adds functionality to the Administration Console to allow administrators to upload external resources (e.g. PDFs, Excel workbooks, images, web links) that can then be explored alongside IA Server data outputs.

The Explorer user interface includes:

• Keyword or free text search – this searches any keywords/descriptive metadata entered by administrators
• Intelligent search tool supports wildcards
• Results of search presented under different tabs (Data Views, Profiles, Indicators, Resources)
• Results consist of links to the items themselves and to their descriptive metadata

InstantAtlas Essentials Video #2 “Making your InstantAtlas reports more Search Engine Friendly”

InstantAtlas Essentials Video #2 looks at ways to make your InstantAtlas reports more search engine friendly.  This video looks at some basic steps you can take to making InstantAtlas reports more accessible for people searching on information related to the themes of your report.

Subscribe with InstantAtlas today to receive our free weekly video tutorials.

Announcing the new InstantAtlas Essentials video collection

This year sees the release of a new collection of InstantAtlas video tutorials called InstantAtlas Essentials .

Today we are posting the first video on the home page of the blog, however future boradcasts can be found on at http://instantatlas.wordpress.com/videos/

We trust you will find them of great value and real asset for learning about InstantAtlas products.

If you would like to be notified when a new video has been published, simply subscribe to this blog or you can also visit http://www.youtube.com/instantatlas its simple and easy to do.

We are also adding the Slide Deck below each video clip

Geowise provides comprehensive classroom training courses for InstantAtlas users, which come in foundation and advanced formats.

Visit our website for further information on the courses.

David Carey

Marketing Manager

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