The JICREG mapping program tries to select colours and styles for your catchments, to allow you to easily tell the differences between them. However, this is extremely difficult to do automatically. Even among different people it is often difficult to achieve a consensus as to what looks best, you may have house style rules to follow - your map may be part of a series and so a repeated catchment needs to always be shown in the same style etc. These scenarios and others like them are common, and it is for this reason that restyling catchments will be one of the most common operations you carry out in PowerPoint.

Editing catchment styles in PowerPoint 2003, requires a little understanding of how maps are grouped together, as we will have to break apart both the map group and the key group to accomplish our task. We start by looking at a newspaper readership penetration map overlayed on a simple drivetime map.

We can immediately see a number of problems with this map. We cannot see our drivetime catchment, because it is hidden behind the sectors making up the readership penetration thematic. Even if it were on top the pale blue colour is very similar to the blues used in the readership penetration thematic. In addition - because of the readership penetration, we cannot really see the style applied to the newspaper circulation area, making the key a bit misleading. We will try and improve upon this map by doing the following:

• Bring the office 20mins drivetime catchment to the front, and change it's style. We will choose a style with no fill, but a distinctive stroke (line), so that we do not hide the readership penetration data behind.
• We will change the style of The Press circulation area in a similar way. The most important part of this change is to also change the key so that the viewer is not confused by the lack of a striped green area on the map.

When changing the style of a catchment, it is important to change the key that goes with it, so as not to lead to confusion.

First we will ungroup, both the map and the keys collection, as we will be making changes to objects that are in both. After ungrouping the top level map and key groups, we then need to ungroup the catchmentkey group.

Now we can go to the select multiple objects dialog and see what we have. There will be a lot of objects, in the list, but hopefully the structure will be apparent to you. The first catchment that we are editing is 'Office 20mins'. If we look through the select multiple object dialog, we can see that this text is mentioned in only three of the items. The first Office 20mins is the catchment shape on the map itself. Office 20minsbox is the box showing the style to the left of the key entry, and Office 20minskeytext is the text to the right of the box. Simple! We have tried to name objects in the mapping so that you will be able to work out what they are in the select multiple objects dialog but don't be afraid to guess and experiment.

First we select just 'Office 20mins' in the select multiple objects dialog.

Then from the Draw toolbar we choose, Bring to Front.

Now we can see our drivetime catchment, but it's semi-transparent fill is hard to distinguish, and it is still a confusing colour. However before editing the style of the fill and edge of the shape, we need to add the keybox to the selection.

Now we can go to Format→Autoshape and select a style that is clearer and doesn't obstruct the readership penetration data. Here we decide to use, no fill and a thick red line. Notice how the style of the keybox also changes. The solid red is different enough from the pastel hot red of the readership penetration, and much thicker than the roads - so the map becomes much more clear.

Next we do a similar operation for the newspaper catchment, only this time we won't bring it to the front. If we leave the tiles of the readership penetration on top, and choose a thick border style for the newspaper, then we can clearly show both, the overall outline of the circulation area and the detail of the readership.

Finally, if you are going to do any further work on your map, it can be a good idea to regroup the map items and the key items, noting as you go the group names that powerpoint assigns to each of them. During your regrouping, you may find that the order of layers on the presentation changes … for example the keys group might be displayed behind the map. You can fix this by selecting the group and using the Bring to Front item on the Draw toolbar as we demonstrated above.

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