Toolbars for GeoCommons and GeoIQ

I first talked about the ArcGIS version of our toolbars back at the DC Dev Meetup in September. Since then we’ve launched our developer site where you can download the toolbars, but you probably haven’t heard very much else about them. Designed to make sharing your analysis easier as well as find additional data we’ve added toolbars for both Excel and ArcGIS.  Based on our .Net library wrapper they both allow direct upload into GeoCommons or your own GeoIQ instance, as well as searching and download of data.

With the addition of GeoJoin earlier this year we made it easier to turn your spreadsheet into a map. Still many of you spend a lot of your time in Excel preparing that spreadsheet. Now we’ve streamlined the process even further with the addition of our Excel toolbar. You can download the toolbar from here and once you’ve installed it there is a “GeoCommons” dropdown available from the menu.  Currently the toolbar has been tested on version 2003-2007 of Excel and versions of Windows XP & 7.

Now with the addition of the ArcGIS Toolbar you can both search GeoCommons/GeoIQ directly from ArcMap and pull additional datasets into your analysis.  One the analysis is finished publish back to GeoCommons or your own GeoIQ instance.  This eliminates the step of saving your files from ArcGIS into a Shapefile, then uploading now you can publish directly.  You can download the toolbar here and it works on version 9.2-9.3.1 of ArcGIS.

This is our first release of our toolbars and we’d love to hear what you think.  Look for additional features as well as increased version support in the future!