Center Text on U.S. Map

[mswoods1]

I've been using Andy Pope's U.S. map located here:

http://www.andypope.info/ngs/ng12.htm

I'm having trouble getting text to align in the center of states. Some states, like California, have odd shapes and it seems like Excel assumes each shape is a rectangle.

To complicate this, I would like to do the text aligning through VBA, since I want to dynamically add/remove labels.

I've messed around with manually aligning text, and this works, but I'd rather not manually do this for every state. I figure that's got to be some algorithm that will accomplish perfect aligning in VBA. Any ideas?

 

[shg]

In terms of top, left, height, and width properties, shapes are defined by their bounding rectangles. You could compute the centroid from the points, but the centroid might not be contained in the shape at all (Michigan, maybe).

You could create a table that lists the state names and the manually-derived offsets of their 'cosmetic centers' from their actual centers as a fraction of their diagonal.