Working with Zip codes in Excel

I got a question recently about how to match ZIP codes to counties, and it occurred to me this could be helpful to others! It's really easy.

You can do this trick with any of the later versions of Excel. 

Step 1. Make sure your zip codes are numbers (not text) in Excel

Step 2. Highlight zip codes and select Data>Data Types>Geography

That's it! Now you will get a little "insert data" icon next to the zip codes that you can use to add other location data, like county, state, city, etc. It will show up in its own column.

Then you can map it. Oh yes I said map it!! In Excel!! I know!!

But first, you probably want to pivot so that the map shades according to frequency of zip/county. Select all the county names and select Insert>Pivot Table. Put counties as your rows and values.

To map this pivot data, you'll need to copy/paste out of the pivot format. Here I just stuck the data back on the first sheet. Then made it Geography data type again--that's an important step! (it lost that during pivoting). Then Insert>Map>Fill Map. 

(note: you can do map at the Zip code level but your polygons will be so small that the boundaries will pretty much obscure the whole map)

See, it's easy right, once you know the steps! Let me know if you try it and what you think of this cool feature of Excel!