Geographic visualizations

In Tableau, the built-in geographic database recognizes geographic roles for fields, such as Country, State, City, Airport, Congressional District, or Zip Code. Even if your data does not contain latitude and longitude values, you can simply use geographic fields to plot locations on a map. If your data does contain latitude and longitude fields, you may use those instead of the generated values.

Tableau will automatically assign geographic roles to some fields based on a field name and a sampling of values in the data. You can assign or reassign geographic roles to any field by right-clicking the field in the data pane and using the Geographic Role option. This is also a good way to see what built-in geographic roles are available.

Tableau can also read shape files and geometries from some databases. These and other geographic capabilities will be covered in more detail in the Mapping Techniques section of Chapter 11, Advanced Visualizations, Techniques, Tips, and Tricks. In the following examples, we'll consider some of the key concepts of geographic visualizing.

Geographic visualization is incredibly valuable when you need to understand where things happen and whether there are any spatial relationships within the data. Tableau offers three main types of geographic visualization:

Filled maps (simply referred to as maps in the Tableau interface)
Symbol maps
Density maps

Table of Contents for Geographic visualizations

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Table of Contents for
Geographic visualizations