Advanced mapping techniques

We've touched on geographic visualization throughout the book. You've seen symbol maps and filled maps. Here we'll take a look at supplying your own geocoded data along with creating custom territories.

Supplementing the standard in geographic data

We saw in Chapter 1, Creating Your First Visualizations and Dashboard, that Tableau generates Latitude and Longitude fields when the data source contains geographic fields that Tableau can match with its internal geographic database. Fields such as country, state, zip code, MSA, and congressional district are contained in Tableau's internal geography. As Tableau continues to add geographic capabilities, you'll want to consult the documentation to determine some specifics on what the internal database contains.

However, if you have latitude and longitude in your dataset or are able to supplement your data source with that data, you can create geographic visualizations with great precision...