I'll demo this using one of my favorite geospatial party tricks: A really, really interesting dataset on the Holocaust.
I found some data here:
Note the origin. I thought this was really, really useful data for teaching about the Holocaust, but I hated the display. I'd much rather have this data displayed on a map.
So:
- I organized this data into one, unified spreadsheet: Jewish demographics circa Holocaust -sheet 2.csv
- ...and then merged this data into a GIS: Jewish populations circa Holocaust ver01a.m3vz
This file runs in My World GIS. How is this a more complex file than the previous one we looked at? How is GIS a more powerful environment for exploring and analyzing the file than Google Earth? (Also: Note that I have a tragically wrong map for this data...how can I get a correct map?)
(And note that you can also plug this data into arcgis.com...but it may require some additional editing...and it still won't display the way I want it to.)