Forum Discussion
Map function using Australian Local Government Areas
Hello ebreese ,
the data that can be processed by filled maps can be very sketchy for locations outside the US. It may well be that the rendering engine does not recognise the boundaries for the local government areas you mention, because it does not fit into the schematic of how Microsoft / Bing breaks things down. They don't have much tolerance for non-US data. If I want to plot NZ data, I have to call the column "regions", if I call it "region" (singular) I get the same error you do.
There's probably not a lot you can do, except to send feedback via the smile icon in the upper right hand corner of the Excel window.
Don't shoot the messenger.
I've just run into a similar problem mapping to Western Australian postcode data. It just fails to recognise some postcodes and suburb names. It looks like a great tool, but needs to be polished before it is of any use. I've had a look at the mapping features in R, but no one yet has generated (or made available) vector graphs of LGAs, suburbs, postcodes, or even states.
I'm aware that this is three years later, so you might have already discovered the ABS digital boundaries
https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/standards/australian-statistical-geography-standard-asgs-edition-3/jul2021-jun2026/access-and-downloads/digital-boundary-files