Map chart in Tableau are a powerful tool that allows users to create graphical visualizations with location, city data, and more. It helps analyze patterns and trends based on location. For example, if you’re working with sales data that has geographic elements, map charts help show the relationship between geography and data variables.
Types of Map Chart in Tableau
Filled maps
These maps fill areas, such as countries or states, with colors that represent data values.
Symbol maps
These use symbols, such as circles, to show geographic locations, and can change size or color based on data values.
Heat maps
Use color gradients to show how dense or intense data is in certain locations.
Density maps
Similar to heat maps but focus on concentrations of data points in geographic areas.
Flow maps
Show movement or connections between locations using lines or arrows.
Background image map
You use custom images behind geographic data, which is useful for non-traditional maps.
Benefits of Map Chart in Tableau
Geographic insights
Helps see regional patterns and trends by visualizing data based on location.
Visual appeal
Easy to understand and makes data more engaging.
Interactive features
You can zoom, filter, or highlight specific areas to dive deeper into the data.
Layered data
Helps show multiple layers of data to understand complex geographic relationships.
Real-time analysis
Can connect to live data, making it easier to analyze geographic data in real-time.
Use case of Map in Tableau
If a retail company wants to analyze sales performance across different regions, a filled-in map can help them visualize sales data across countries or states. It quickly shows which regions are performing well or not. To go deeper, a symbol map can show store locations, with the size of the symbol representing each store’s revenue.
Dataset description
The dataset contains data at the nation level, which includes sales, profits, population, and geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude). North America, Asia, South America, Europe, Oceania, and Africa are the six regions that are represented by the dataset. In addition to highlighting demographic statistics such as population, it emphasizes economic variables such as sales and profit, which enables comparisons to be made. A spatial analysis and representation of the data can be made easier with the help of the geographic coordinates. You can download that is used in this experiment from here.
Steps to create Map Chart in Tableau
Step 1: Open Tableau
Step 2: Click on Text file to connect with Tableau
There are lots of data sources that you can use in Tableau such as excel, pdf, cloud sources and many more.
Step 3: Browse csv file (or other file format as your need) and click on Open
Step 4: Click on Sheet 1 (Worksheet) to make visual
Step 5: Drag-n-drop Longitude (generated) in Columns and Latitude (generated) in Rows to show map based on coordinates
Step 6: Now, drag-n-drop Country and Sales over Label (under Marks card); drag-n-drop Country over Color
Step 7: Right click on Country marked by Color and select Attribute
Output:
Conclusion
Map chart in Tableau can be used to look at data based on where it is and show patterns or trends. In data sets like sales, people, or environmental data, they help show how data is related to space. With a few easy steps, Tableau users can make interactive maps that help them understand data better and make choices based on that data.
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