Colorizing countries
 

I know what I want to do, but unfortunately I don't know if it's possible or
not, so I'm grateful for any indicator of whether I'm being completely
unrealistic or not.

Basically I want to be able to color in images of countries on a map, with
the colors being based on data in an excel range. There are a couple of ways
I've tried to approach the problem, but I haven't been able to find a
reasonable way of actually achieving my goal.

- I have no problems with setting up a VBA function to change the colors of
shapes on a work sheet - the only problem is that I don't have any shapes
that look like countries. Is it possible for me to create new custom shapes
to use in excel directly from existing vector graphics?

- Another alternative is to use Excel's functions for colorizing images -
this doesn't seem likely to produce as good results, and I don't know the VBA
code for colorizing images.

- The final alternative, which seems most attractive but is completely
beyond me is to integrate Excel data and SVG-files. All the countries of the
world are available as SVG files - is there some simple way I can input data
into excel and use it as the basis for an SVG fill or border? This would be
the preferred choice.

Do any of these seem like a viable path? How would I best go about trying to
solve my challenge?

Thanks for your input.