naw, I spent too much time massaging it as it was. The prob was that I couldn't find the map website I'd used a couple years ago where they out much better, just like the ones in post 20.
These graphics are really not that hard to do, u just upload the numbers and they spit out the pic. Easy peasy. It's the time & energy to tweak that's hard; now if I were being paid to do this or something...
I use Tableau but that is because I find Tableau fun to use and much better than Excel as a stand alone BI tool. Gradients take less than a minute to do. Tableau already has a map graphic and I just import the numbers. I was playing around last night with birth rates of different countries, just for fun and to answer another forum thread.