When I saw Robert Kosoro's cool ZIPScribble map, I knew I had to create a SAS version - and of course I had to add a few enhancements along the way....

I was perusing some of the examples on dadaviz.com, and Kosoro's ZIPScribble map caught my attention. It wasn't a particularly useful map, but it drew me in. Here's a screen-capture of the map:

I knew that I could easily create a similar map with SAS, using the zip code centroids from sashelp.zipcode, and plotting the latitude/longitude centroid values with Proc GPlot. But, even for a silly/fun example, I like to see if I can add a bit of analytic flair.

Therefore, rather than plotting the raw latitude/longitude centroids, I used Proc GProject to convert the coordinates into a more aesthetic map shape that we're accustomed to seeing (rather than all-flat along the northern border). And rather than making all the lines black, I let SAS randomly assign a color (based on the ODS style) by state, so you can more easily see the state groupings. And if you click the map below to look at the interactive version, you can see the html hover-text I added for each 'clump' of lines based on 3-digit zip codes (well, there's a bit of overlap, so this isn't perfect ... but it seems useful).