arcgis-desktopcartogram
There are several types of cartograms out in the world, but I feel the best one are the continuous cartograms made with separate pixels. I recently made one on paper and then transcribed it to excel by filling in each cell with different colors. This was time consuming and disheartening. Is there a straightforward way of doing a similar cartogram in ArcGIS?
Examples
The latest version of the Cartogram plugin, which works in QGIS 2.2, is here: https://github.com/CristianCantoro/cartogram-plugin , pending a pull request.
To prove it works in 2.2 I created a bendy map of London with it:
carto http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/15008199/Images-2-share/carto-2.2.png
To install, unzip/clone the repository into the qgis2/python/plugins folder. E.g., this is how I did it on my Linux system:
mv repos/cartogram-plugin-master ~/.qgis2/python/plugins/
You should then find the icon in QGIS's top bar next time you load it.
(1) I have usually heard of it referred to as a "Hexagonal Map" or "Hexagonal Grid Map". Both queries turn up a lot of relevant results in Google. Example Link Here: http://anitagraser.com/2012/03/04/mapping-density-with-hexagonal-grids/
The link above also outlines the process that you would use in QGIS.
If you want to do it in ArcGIS. This article from the ESRI blog offers some insight into the flow in model builder and also a link to the geoprocessing package you can download. Package Link Here
Best Answer
The links in the suggested duplicate are depreciated so, this is worth addressing again.
I like ScapeToad for generating cartograms. It is free, implements a robust algorithm, easy to use and operates on shapefiles.