Tableau Your Data!: Fast and Easy Visual Analysis with Tableau Software

CHAPTER 5

Using Maps to Improve Insight

In our time, when men have looked upon Earth from afar, seeing it as a small, glistening sphere spinning in the black sea of space, it requires a long backward flight of imagination to appreciate earlier perception of Earth. There were visions of wonder and myth, and often they were marvelously wrong.

JOHN WILFORD¹

People are accustomed to using maps to find places, predict the weather, and see information regarding world events. Seeing your data displayed on a map can provide new insight. Tableau provides three standard map formats. If you don't like the standard maps you can replace them with customized maps provided by web mapping services. Or, if you have spatial data that is too small to fit on a map, you can replace maps with images.

If you have a connection to the web, Tableau's standard maps provide very granular geographic details. Alternatively, if you don't have an available Internet connection, Tableau allows you to change to locally-rendered offline maps. Building Maps Quickly with Show Me.

If your data includes geographic information, you can create a map visualization in less than five seconds by double-clicking on any geographic dimension (denoted by the globe icon), then double-clicking on any measure. When you do this, Tableau will place three pills on the appropriate shelves and present you with a map view of your data with the measures placed at the center of the geographic unit you selected. Tableau provides two different ...