Tableau 10 Complete Reference

Creating geographic visualizations

Tableau makes creating geographic visualizations very easy. The built-in geographic database recognizes geographic roles for fields, such as country, state, city, 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 contains latitude and longitude fields, you may use those instead of the generated values.

Although most databases do not strictly define geographic roles for fields, Tableau will automatically assign geographic roles to the fields based on the field name and a sampling of values in the data. You can assign or re-assign geographic roles to any field by right-clicking on the field in the data ...