Tableau Stories: A Powerful Geographical Data Visualization

Data visualization and Reporting has become one of the hottest trends in the current business world. There are multiple BI tools for data visualization in the market with Tableau and Power BI leading the race. These are two very powerful tools that can provide insights by visualizing the existing data and using it for development of the business.

Tableau enables the users to create interactive and meaningful visualizations in the form of dashboards, stories, and worksheets to outlay business insights for better decision-making process within organizations. It is also very user-friendly in a way that a non-technical user can also create these dashboards or use them in the decision-making process. The tool is robust enough that it can input data from multiple sources and has a wide range of functionalities that could deal with any type of data. The data inputted into the tool is either identified as a dimension or a measure. Dimensions provide qualitative information and measures contain the numbers that quantify the analysis. For this blog, we will be dealing with one very interesting data type – Geographical data.

Geographical Data

Tableau understands the importance of geographical data and it reflects in its functionality offerings that lead to a wide range of actions. It is relatively easy to deal with Geographic data in Tableau starting from inputting the data, formatting the geographic data type, creating hierarchies for deep drilling, quantifying the maps with other quant data etc. It offers a wide range of visualizations and deep drilling that makes it easy for anyone to understand the story and findings.

Functions

1. Reading Geographic data -  Tableau can identify the columns with Country, State, Province, State, and City. It can also identify the geographic data from the longitude and latitude data provided in the dataset. In case if tableau is not able to read the data as geographic data, the user can assign a geographic role to the column data. Tableau also has an additional feature to create a hierarchy of the geographic data set so that the tool could provide a drill through visualization of the data.

2. Formatting Map Locations – Tableau offers a range of formatting options for maps used to visualize. It is often that we use short forms such as SFO or LA. It is difficult for Tableau to read them as San Francisco or Los Angeles, hence they introduced a functionality where we can edit the location and change it to actual city names.

3. Customization of Maps – This is one of the biggest functionalities of maps in Tableau. The tool offers some powerful functionalities such as customizing the looks of the map, creating territories within a map (West Coast, East Coast etc.), providing interactions within a map (turning off a zoom, provide toolbar options etc.), dealing with source of the map, using external map sources, leveraging options to use spatial data, geocoding maps data and many more functionalities.

Insights

1. Visualizing a basic map with hierarchy: This will provide drill through options where we can identify the data based on Country->State->City, improving decisions to the level of granularity required.

2. Map that shows Quantitative Values: The sales of a product or profit margins of a service could be a laid out on a map and further drilled based on the hierarchy, providing analysis based on area.

3. Maps that Highlight Visual Clusters of Data: These maps help in spotting visual clusters of data, identifying the similar data points within a location on the map.

4. Maps that Show a Path Over Time: These types of maps provide details on the path of a hurricane or a tsunami. It could also help in providing maps of sporting activities such as marathons etc. These maps also indicate the origins and destinations on the maps.

5. Maps with Visual graphs such as Bar, Pie Charts etc.: The pie mark type can be useful to show simple proportions to a relative whole. For example, pie marks might be effective when you want to show the percentage of profit for a product by geographic location.

Limitations and Recommendations

One of the major reasons for Tableau being consistently ranked in the Gartner’s leaders quadrant is because of its comprehensive developers who release frequent updates of functions for every data type. The latest version of Tableau covers a wide range of functions that could be performed on Geographical data. However, I feel that tableau could further address the below-identified limitations.

1. It would be helpful if we can analyze the distance between two points on a map visualization. Imagine a visual where we have identified a supply map and a demand map for a product produced by ABC company. We see that company is meeting the supply needs in Phoenix and notices the demand for the same product in Tucson. The tableau visualization should have a function that could give the distance between the two points to help management decide the logistics and decide if the product can be supplied in Tucson.

  

2. Blending of two different map visualizations. We should have an option where we can blend two different map visualizations such as supply map and demand map. Tableau can provide a function that can identify the areas where the demand exists and supply lacks. This will help users identify business needs and take decisions accordingly.

Finally, Tableau is a powerful BI tool that could help users Represent geography in the best way to tell a data story.