Poor mans geocoding

This is a great tip I received recently from Stephen McDaniel (http://www.freakalytics.com) on how to make Tableau recognise geographic locations which it does not know about by default.

For example, you may have a list of areas, regions, zones etc – anything which you consider to have a geographic position, but you may not know the latitude and longitude of this location.

In this example, I take two locations – DULWICH (my home) and ANGEL (my colleagues home) and plot them on a Tableau map.  Remember I do not know the latitude and longitude of these locations – but I do know their OUTCODE (the first part of the postcode – used in the UK).

STEP 1 – Add some data to Tableau – the data set I used is as follows:

Location Name       Sales Volume

DULWICH               28

ANGEL                    16

STEP 2 – Copy and paste the data into Tableau (see this post if you haven’t done this)

STEP 3 – Assign a geographic role to the field location name – I chose OUTCODE – (see this post if you don’t have outcode in your list)

STEP 4 – Edit the locations – this is the bottom option in the fly out menu previously used – assigning an appropriate outcode to each of the locations names

STEP 5 – Double click ‘Location name’ to draw your map

Easy! – If you are interested in mapping in Tableau, please read my other post here:

5 minute mapping

And an excellent (jedi level) post from clearly and simply here

Comments

[brett]

Tom great tip thanks for passing it on cheers brett

[Robert]

Tom,

nice quick tip. Thanks for the link to my blog.

Robert