Tableau: Data Cleaning for Geographic Maps

Standard

Data cleaning is a major part of any analytic’s/data-visualization undertaking. If data cleaning is ignored then it leads to inaccurate data reporting & thus suboptimal business decisions.

To that end, if you create a Tableau’s Geographic map, please check the accuracy of your data by going to:

Menu Bar > Map > Edit Locations

Let me give you some examples:

Now, I have “states/province” as my geographic role for the variable and when I created a geographic map, I created a geographic map it didn’t show any state for New York State! See Before:

data cleaning geogrphic map before

So what did I do?

I navigated to Menu bar > Map > Edit locations:

data cleaning geogrphic map State

So I fixed it!

data cleaning geogrphic map Tableau

And After:

data cleaning geogrphic map after

Note that New York State is lighted up!

In the past, I’ve also have entered Latitude & Longitude if need be.  This is when it was not able to recognize few US cities and it was saying “ambiguous” – I inputted Latitude & Longitude to clean the data:

data cleaning geogrphic map city

Conclusion:

In this post, I described how you should check the data accuracy of a Tableau Geographic Map.

One thought on “Tableau: Data Cleaning for Geographic Maps”

  1. MICHAEL SHERMAN

    Paras, I saw your article when I was researching the following problem:
    Our primary sales area contains the US and Canada. My sales data contains the state/province, but Tableau will not recognize the provinces if I Edit Locations and set the country to United States.
    If I set the Country to None, 16 states and provinces are now labeled as Ambiguous! Contrary to your article, I cannot manually identify the UT as Utah as it only gives me the option of entering the latitude & longitude.
    How can I fix Ambiguous states?

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