The EViews geomap object is capable of using Esri ( www.esri.com) shapefiles to draw geographic maps.

The shapefile format is a popular file format for storing and describing geographic information about a collection of shapes. Shapefiles are readily available from various sources on the internet. Some examples of shapefile sources include the United States Census ( www.census.gov) and ArcGIS ( https://hub.arcgis.com/).

Geomaps are useful for visualizing data that are tied to specific geographic regions. You can for example create a world geomap and using color-mapping feature to color the map shapes for country based on their GDP.