The ability to easily & intuitively communicate insights, trends, opportunities is critical to what we do. Often the path to doing this is as simple as how the "data" is presented. Case and point - we all can stare at tables of data broken down into 50 rows by state, or alphabetic lists of DMA cities - but that loses ALL ability to in one Picture see the significance of geo graphic trends, shifts, opportunities, segmetns, etc.
It used to be you had a map type native to Excel. Example below is from when we first started raising this idea in 2006 using Map Point to show product interest nationally. It would be a huge addition to Site Catalyst to let us Dashboard and share information with our partners and customers on natural maps like those showing the GeoSegment visit numbers. Better yet let us put them in motion to show trends over time!
See Also: IDEA: Geosegment ALL data