Creating custom territories

Custom territories are geographic areas or regions that you create (or that the data defines) as opposed to those that are built in (such as country or area code). Tableau gives you two options for creating custom territories: ad hoc custom territories and field-defined custom territories. We’ll explore these next.

Ad hoc custom territories

You can create custom territories in an ad hoc way by selecting and grouping marks on a map. Simply select one or more marks, hover over one, and then use the Group icon. Alternately, right-click one of the marks to find the option. You can create custom territories by grouping by any dimension if you have latitude and longitude in the data or any geographic dimension if you are using Tableau’s generated latitude and longitude.

Here, using the Real Estate with Custom Territories data source, we’ll consider an example using zip code:

Figure 12.15: After selecting the filled regions...