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Use SAS to help plan your next vacation!

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By Topics | Analytics Data Visualization
Industries | Travel

SAS is great at helping make important business decisions - how about helping decide where to take your next vacation?...

Here's a picture from one of my favorite vacations with my buddy Joe. As you can see, I like "nature vacations." Can you guess where this one was? (leave a comment with your best guess!)

dunes

I was looking around for potential vacation spots to visit this summer, and came across a cool article on the CNN website that listed one great natural wonder in each of the 50 US states. The article was laid out on a single page, and it took a lot of scrolling to find the states I was interested in. So I thought to myself, "Self - why don't you plot this data on a SAS map, and set up drilldowns in the map that jump to the desired state in the article?"

And that's exactly what I did! Click the thumbnail below to see the full-size interactive SAS map. Hover over the markers to see summary info, and click the markers (or the states) to jump to that state's section of the CNN article. It's a nice example of visual (and geographical) analytics, to show the power of SAS!

us_natural_wonders

 

Tags analytics geographical graph vacation
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About Author

Robert Allison

The Graph Guy!

Robert has worked at SAS for over a quarter century, and his specialty is customizing graphs and maps - adding those little extra touches that help them answer your questions at a glance. His educational background is in Computer Science, and he holds a BS, MS, and PhD from NC State University.

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14 Comments

  2. Julie4435637 on

    The map is not working for me. The hovering is fine but when I click the dot - I am taken to the top of the CNN article - not the state section.

    • Robert Allison
      Robert Allison on

      Julie - try it a couple more times. Their page seems to have a random problem with the anchors, such that they don't work about 1 time out of 10 (at least that's what I'm seeing using Internet Explorer). If the problem persists, you might also try viewing it using a different browser if you've got and extra one (such as IE, Google Chrome, Firefox, etc).

  4. Ronan on

    Thanks for sharing. Stunning landscapes !

    My personal guess :

    Death Valley, USA
    Atacama Desert, Chile
    ?

  7. Leonid Batkhan on

    Great usage, Robert, and great pictures! Let me guess: Sahara Desert? Would be also nice if you provide some explaining on how you did it.

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