Make Your First GIS Map

Enough theory. The best way to make everything so far click into place is to build a real map, end to end. This chapter is a hands-on walkthrough you can follow start to finish.

Here's the shape of what we're about to do, the same workflow behind almost every GIS project:

What you'll make

A simple interactive map from a small dataset: points on a map, styled sensibly, with a popup that shows useful information, shared with a link. Nothing fancy, but every step here is exactly what you'd do on a bigger project.

Good starter datasets are small, familiar, and point-based. Think coffee shops, parks, schools, public toilets, bike parking, a tree inventory, or a handful of your own sites or customers.

Step 1: Get the data

Whatever you use, keep it small for your first go; a few dozen rows is plenty. You want to spend your time learning the tool, not waiting for data to load.

Step 2: Open or upload the data

Open the file in your tool of choice. In a desktop GIS you'd add it as a layer; in a web GIS like Mango you'd upload it. Either way, the first thing to do is look: do your points appear where you expect them to on the map? If everything piles up off the coast of Africa at 0°, 0°, your latitude/longitude columns are probably swapped or empty, a very common first-timer hiccup.

Step 3: Check the attributes

Before styling anything, get to know your columns (your attributes). For each one, ask:

• What does this column mean?
• Is it a category (text like "type" or "status"), a number, or a date?
• Are there missing or obviously wrong values?

This five-minute look tells you which columns to map and what your popups will need.

Step 4: Choose the right map type

Now decide what you want the map to show, then pick the type to match. If you're mapping simple locations, a point map is perfect. If your points have a category, colour them by it; if they have a meaningful number, size or shade them by it. When in doubt, flip back to the decision table in GIS Mapping.

Step 5: Style the map

Style your layer from the data: choose colours for categories, sizes for quantities, and keep it restrained. Remember the cartography basics: make the important thing obvious, don't use too many colours, and keep the basemap quiet so your data stands out.

Step 6: Configure popups

A popup is what turns a dot into information. Pick the two or three attributes a reader actually cares about (a name, maybe an address or a value) and leave the rest out. A good popup answers "what is this?" at a glance, without clutter.

Step 7: Share or publish the map

Finally, get it in front of someone. Decide whether the map should be public, private, or somewhere in between, then share the link or embed it in a page. Check it on a phone too; most people who open your map will be on one.

Step 8: What you just learned

Take a moment to notice what you just did. You:

• Started with raw data
• Chose a map type that fit the question
• Styled the layer from the data
• Built a popup that shows useful information
• Published an interactive web map
• Shared it with someone else

That's the whole GIS workflow in miniature, and it's the same loop, just bigger, on every project from here on.

Try it in Mango

If you'd like to do all of this without installing anything, Mango is built for exactly this last mile: upload your dataset, style the points, configure the popup, and share your first interactive map, all in the browser.