Help Pages » Tutorial: Naming Conventions
Naming Conventions are a way to organize and refer to groups of regions. There are two essential cases in which naming conventions are important.
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When editing the region labels that display above regions:
To customize your map, you may wish to alter the default display name for a set of regions. The display name is simply one of many possible naming conventions and must be added manually (covered first) or imported (covered last).
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When importing new statistics:
When importing a new statistic, UUorld needs to know how to match the regions in the imported CSV file to region boundaries. Naming conventions make this connection. By creating new naming conventions, you can create a perfect alignment of your spreadsheets with the regions/shapefiles already supported by UUorld. This capability can also be useful for connecting your stats to your own imported shapefiles if the region names don't match.
Edit Naming Conventions
Click "Edit Region Names" in the File menu.
This will open the Naming Conventions window. Click the Filter menu to show only a selected collection of regions:
Edit existing region labels by double-clicking the text in a cell. In the example above, we may we wish to add two-letter state abbreviations into the label_2 column. (Up to 10 alternate labels may be created for any set of regions.) We can click into the empty cells in the label_2 column and type in the two letter abbreviations. Clicking OK will save the new naming convention.
Set display name
To set a new display name for a set of regions, use the Filter menu to select a particular set of regions, then choose a new display name from the drop-down menu in the top right. Clicking the set display name button will copy the naming convention selected into the display_name column.
Import New Naming Conventions
To create a new naming convention, all that is required is to import a CSV file containing the desired values paired with an existing set of names. This is a much faster operation than manually entering the new names, and is highly recommended.
Create a new CSV file containing two or more columns with the names you want to import and any of the already exiting region names. The first column should contain a reference naming convention that already exists in UUorld. The second (and third, fourth, etc.) columns should contain new naming conventions. All columns in the csv will be imported, so if you only intend to bring in one new set of names, just remove all other columns (and save the file with a new name).
For example, the following simple CSV would be have the same effect as the manual editing in the screenshot above, adding two-letter state abbreviations in both cases:
Alabama,AL
Alaska,AK
Arizona,AZ
To start, click File, then Import Naming Conventions. Select the CSV file, and the appropriate region level (state, county, zip code, etc.).
Click Continue.
The next screen will prompt you to select the column in your CSV that you wish to use as the reference naming convention. This is the name set that matches with an existing one. Next correlate this references naming convention with one of the existing naming conventions which will be displayed for you to make a selection. All other columns will be added as new names.
Click Finish, and the process is complete.
If you have questions beyond what is covered in here, don't hesitate to write to us. We're happy to help.