Tableau Desktop Cookbook

Chapter 18. Advanced Mapping

In Chapter 6, we covered basic mapping functionality within Tableau. This chapter covers the more advanced mapping techniques and functionality that you can do within Tableau. These advanced mapping techniques came into Tableau from 2018 onward and made an impression on how you can advance your mapping capabilities.

Always map responsibly and make sure you are taking into consideration proportionality (not creating a map that misrepresents the data).

This chapter uses United States mainland flights data to enable full use of the mapping capabilities.

Note

Tableau has some mapping capabilities built in—for example, the ability to select a state or city as a geographic field. To use the advanced mapping functionality, you will need to have a dedicated latitude and longitude field to use within spatial calculations.

18.1 Density Marks

The Density mark type was first mentioned in Chapter 11, where you learned to use this mark type on a scatter plot to visualize the highest concentration of data. This mark type is also appropriate for mapping. It allows the users to see the concentration of data around a given area.

Problem

You want to see the concentration of airports on the mainland US.

Solution

1. Double-click Origin Latitude and Origin Longitude, and add Origin Name to Detail:

   

2. Change the mark type to Density:

3. Your view will now look like this: ...