Maps
Here, I’ll walk you through what is a lot of people’s favorite part about Tableau: their maps! We can use maps to see if there’s any trends or geographic patterns. We’ll go over 3 types of maps: symbol maps, filled maps, and density maps.
Great thing about mapping in Tableau: it can take you less than 3 seconds to create a map if everything goes right.
Tableau has automatic geocoding, which means that if you have a field that contains country names, or zip codes, or even airport locations and you set your field to be a geographic data type, Tableau can automatically geocode it.
Let’s scroll down to Location on our dimensions
- Click Country
Tableau only shows what’s in your data, so here we can see that we’re only looking at the U.S. Superstore data.
- Click State
Now we can add more detail and see a drop for every state.
Let’s first build a filled map. For filled maps, we can only use country or state, not cities, because cities can’t fill up the map. All you have to do is add whatever measure you want to see to the color card
- Add Sum(Sales) to color card
If you want to see text on the states, click on Label, and click Show Mark Labels. In filled maps, we can quickly and easily see the states that have the most sales by the darker color hues.
Now let’s build a symbol map.
- Click City
I want to dive further into detail and show each city that’s in our data, and let’s see the sum of sales per city
- Click Sum(Sales)
Tableau automatically places our sales on the size card. Now we can see that we’ve easily built a symbol map that shows us by size where are largest sales are across the country. We can also adjust the size by clicking on Size and add a border to make it easier to see by clicking on Color and clicking on Border.
We can also add another layer of detail by once again introducing profit to our map.
- Drag Profit to Color
Now this gives us way more insight: there are some cities with large sales but loss of profit!
We can also play with tooltips a bit to give us even more insight: Let’s see if discount has anything to say about this.
- Drag Discount to Tooltip
Now that we’ve dragged Discount to Tooltip, we can hover over the marks with profit loss and see what amounts of discounts are given to these cities.
Now let’s make our last map, a density map. Sometimes we want to build a density map for when a lot of dots are overlapping on the map and we want to see quickly where a lot of data points are clustered.
- Click City
- Change Marks to Density
And there you go, you can easily see where your customers are concentrated.
If you want to change the look of your map, you can go to Map and Map Layers at the top of your screen and play around with it.
Want to see one more cool trick? This tip is called “viz in tooltip” and it’s exactly how it sounds… You can put a snapshot of another visualization on the hovers!
What you need to do is create a new sheet building what you want to show in the tooltip. Let’s go to our symbol map and look at it. If you were the client and you wanted to get just a little more detail on this map what would you want to see when you hover over a city? Maybe you’d want to see something like the customers that are costing you money in each city. We’ve already made that viz when we made the Customer Sales worksheet and set the profit slider filter to only see negative profits. Let’s place it in our tooltip.
- On your Symbol Map, click on Tooltip. Go to Insert, Sheets, Select your sheet.
- Select “Customer Sales”
And voila! Now when you hover over a city you can see the customers with the biggest sales but negative profits.
And lastly, your final tip: If you ever are a bit confused as to what is going on in your worksheet, you can:
- Click Worksheet, Describe Sheet
And it will give you some description of what exactly is going on!