Welcome to another instalment of my blog series “10 things about Tableau 10“. This time we’ll be looking at Tableau 10’s new mapping features; specifically Custom territories.
Custom territories is something I’ve personally been looking forward to in Tableau 10 quite a bit since Tableau has always been an excellent tool for geographical data analysis. And now with the latest version, there’s even more reason to throw your data on a map!
Custom Territories
The Custom territories feature allows you to group dimension members on map in custom groups, which allows for better analysis. For example, here we have a dataset from Statistics Finland (Tilastokeskus) about census data in Finland from 2014. This dataset is one I’ve used before in my Summer of Data blog series. In this dataset, the inhabitants of Finland are split into postal codes. This is neat but since we’re interested in looking at how many people live in a specific postal area, this map is less than ideal.
Using the tooltip, we can hover over each individual postal code area but it’s a little too granular to get a bigger picture of how many people live in Lapland (postal area 99), for example.
In order to leverage custom territories, we first create a Calculated Field, which reads the first 2 digits from our postal code dimension. This gives us the proper amount of aggregation for our custom territories.
After we have our calculated field, using the new Create from… feature in the Geographic Role datatype, we’ll use our Postal code dimension to create the custom territories.
Then it’s only a matter of using our new Postal Area calculated field in the viz. Dropping it on Color will group all our postal codes by their first two digits and allow us to drill up in the Country hierarchy that we had defined earlier.
Now instead of having to hover over all the different postal codes individually, we can just hover over the aggregated custom territory and see how many people live in Lapland – the answer is 26 118.
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