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:

So what did I do?

I navigated to Menu bar > Map > Edit locations:

So I fixed it!

And 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:

Conclusion:

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