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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Great Circles & Curved Flight Paths: Tableau & SQL Server Geospatial
Posted on June 8, 2018 by Joshua Milligan in All, Calculations, Mapping / Geographic Visualization, New Features.How can you leverage SQL Server geospatial tools in Tableau to draw cool curved flight paths (or any great arcs)? I’m glad you asked! When I first started learning Tableau, one of the most difficult things I encountered was the Path shelf. I just didn’t get it. Why would lines break when you placed certain […]
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Draw circles with exact distance radius on maps in Tableau
Posted on April 24, 2018 by Joshua Milligan in All, Calculations, DataViz, Mapping / Geographic Visualization, New Features, Tips and Tricks.Tableau 2018.1 introduces a lot of new features, especially geospatial features that open a whole new world of data exploration and analysis. With support for SQL Server geospatial data types, there are near-infinite possibilities. I’m sure I’ll have more than a few posts on various options soon! Here’s one thing you can do: render circles […]
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Hex Map Spatial File
Posted on December 21, 2017 by Joshua Milligan in All, Data Shape & Structure, DataViz, Mapping / Geographic Visualization.I love hex maps! Especially for the United States, you can keep states in a basic geographic orientation, but eliminate the visual perception problems caused by the fact that some states are huge compared to others (and Alaska and Hawaii shift the scale when added). But there are a few headaches that can occur when […]
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Hot Swapping Geographic Levels of Detail in a Tableau Viz
Posted on November 13, 2017 by Joshua Milligan in All, Calculations, Data Blending & Joining, Data Shape & Structure, DataViz, Mapping / Geographic Visualization, New Features.I used to think you couldn’t hot-swap geographic levels of detail in a Tableau visualization. And, before Tableau 10, you couldn’t. I mean, of course in Desktop or web authoring mode you can drag and drop fields, but for the end-user of a dashboard that wasn’t an option. You might have thought to use […]
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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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Joshua Milligan is a four-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.
