Category Archives: Mapping / Geographic Visualization
Here you’ll find tips and tricks for mapping and geographic #dataviz. And you’ll find visualizations and dashboards that make use of maps.
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The Changing Shape of History: From the Colonies to the United States
Posted on March 23, 2017 by Joshua Milligan in All, Dashboards, DataViz, Mapping / Geographic Visualization, New Features, Storytelling & Commentary.I previously shared the fun I had with Tableau 10.2’s ability to connect to spatial files. In that case, I used historic shape files from the Newberry Library’ repository of historical county boundaries files. When I saw that the first Iron Viz feeder contest would feature spatial file visualization, I knew I already had an interesting data […]
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Fun with spatial files in Tableau 10.2
Posted on February 22, 2017 by Joshua Milligan in All, Dashboards, Data Blending & Joining, DataViz, Dates, Fun, Mapping / Geographic Visualization, New Features, Storytelling & Commentary.Tableau 10.2 is almost here! And it’s time to celebrate! One thing I’ve always wanted to do in Tableau is create interactive historical maps that changed based on the selected time-frame. We are fairly familiar with the shape of things now – countries, states, counties – but how did things look in the past? What […]
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Where Food is Scarce…
Posted on April 22, 2016 by Joshua Milligan in All, Dashboards, DataViz, Mapping / Geographic Visualization, Storytelling & Commentary.Having never previously entered into the Tableau #IronViz feeder contests, I was eager to participate this year. The category of the first contest: Food! That’s a broad topic and the rules indicated that any data set was allowed as long as it was “tangentially related” to food. (By the way, if you like my viz, […]
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Tableau Mapping Tip: Geographic Drill Down
Posted on February 17, 2015 by Joshua Milligan in All, Calculations, Data Blending & Joining, Mapping / Geographic Visualization, Tableau Tip Tuesday, Tips and Tricks.Previously, we saw how to capture and use Tableau’s automatically generated latitude and longitude for custom geocoding. Now, we’ll extend that technique to give us the ability to drill up and down on various levels of geographic detail in a single visualization: The data is fairly standard. We have Regions which contain 2 or […]
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Poor Man’s Custom Geocoding in Tableau (Part 2)
Posted on February 10, 2015 by Joshua Milligan in All, Data Blending & Joining, Mapping / Geographic Visualization, Tableau Tip Tuesday, Tips and Tricks.Last time we looked at a simple way to implement custom geocoding in Tableau using the ability to assign latitude and longitude to unknown locations. That’s a fairly good option if you only have a few locaitons and only need to plot marks on a map or two in a single workbook. But what happens if […]
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Tableau Tip Tuesday: Poor Man’s Custom Geocoding (Part 1)
Posted on February 3, 2015 by Joshua Milligan in All, Dashboards, Mapping / Geographic Visualization, Tableau Tip Tuesday, Tips and Tricks.Tableau has outstanding built-in geocoding capabilities. If you have countries, states, zip codes, congressional districts, statistical areas, etc… in your data then Tableau knows where to plot marks on a map. But there are times when you have data that doesn’t match up with standard geographic locations. There are great tools and techniques out there for generating […]
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The Story of the Second Punic War
Posted on July 17, 2014 by Joshua Milligan in All, Dashboards, Mapping / Geographic Visualization, Storytelling & Commentary.I love history, but I find it difficult to remember all the details. That’s mostly the way it’s taught and presented. Lectures, lots of reading, lists of names and dates, facts and figures. But all of that can be told visually as a data story! And that makes it easier to remember and understand. So, […]
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3 Easy Tableau Tips for Confident, Clean-Shaven Maps
Posted on April 29, 2014 by Joshua Milligan in All, Calculations, Dashboards, Mapping / Geographic Visualization, Tips and Tricks.Wow! Tableau Tips Month is almost over and I almost missed it! (Or maybe I was just early with this tip: 1 Easy Tip to get Clustered Bar Charts ) So to make up for my tardiness, I’ll give 3 easy Tableau tips for the price of 1! Imagine the following maps as components of a […]
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Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) in Tableau
Posted on August 20, 2013 by Joshua Milligan in All, Mapping / Geographic Visualization.I was asked recently to do a small research project recently into why Tableau wasn’t recognizing certain MSAs (metropolitan statistical areas) even though they were clearly the official name released by the census bureau and the U.S. Office of Management and Budget. It turns out that Tableau typically includes major updates of geographic data in […]
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Mapping Distances – An Alternate Approach
Posted on May 23, 2013 by Joshua Milligan in All, Mapping / Geographic Visualization.The Issue A common technique for calculating distances in Tableau is to use a custom SQL statement to join a dataset to itself. This causes each data row to contain two latitude and longitude values. Then a row-level calculation can use a formula (such as Haversine) to determine the distance. However, many data source connections […]
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Want to understand how Tableau works and how you can use it like a master?
Joshua Milligan is a three-time Tableau Zen Master. His passion is training, mentoring, and helping people gain insights and make decisions based on their data through data visualization using Tableau. He is a principal consultant at Teknion Data Solutions, where he has served clients in numerous industries since 2004.
Joshua served as technical reviewer on several Tableau titles and is the author of the book Learning Tableau.
