How to Make a Geo Map in Tableau
Tableau Basics
Making maps in tableau is a quick and easy way to display data points related to geographical locations. For football/soccer analytics, you could use this type of visualization to quantify a metric(s) for a team or player. In Tableau you can make a symbol map and a regular map. Below I did a symbol map showing where USMNT players play their club football in Europe. For this tutorial, I’ll be doing a regular map of which countries Sunil Chhetri has scored against throughout his legendary international career. For both map types, many of the steps will apply to each other. If you want to follow along with the data I used, you can access it here.
Step 1: Getting Set Up
Once we load in the data into Tableau, the first thing we want to do is convert the “Geographic Role” for the “Team” table from “None” to “Country/Region”. This way Tableau will read the country names into the sheet. A little globe icon should appear next to the “Team” field once we convert it.
Drag“Team” into “Columns” and “Goals” into “Rows” and these options should light up under “Show Me” in the top right corner. For this tutorial, select the “maps” box.
Once we click on the ”Maps” option our sheet should look like this(refer to Figure 1). This will give us all the teams that Chhetri has made an appearance against, but we want the teams he has scored at least 1 goal against. Drag the “Goals” field into the “Filters” section and after selecting “Sum” make the minimum 1(refer to Figure 2). Once this step is complete countries like Australia should be unhighlighted since Chhetri hasn’t scored against them.
Step 2:Editing Locations
Depending on the data being used, Tableau may not recognize the locations we have in our data once we convert it to a geographic location. In the bottom right corner we can see how many locations aren’t being recognized by Tableau(refer to Figure 3). When we right click, we can see an option to “Edit Locations”. There we can see which locations aren’t being recognized properly. In our data, we have 1 location that isn’t recognized and it happens to be Chinese Taipei. Tableau recognizes Chinese Taipei as Taiwan, so all we have to do is click on “Unrecognized” and type in Taiwan(refer to Figure 4). We can also manually enter in longitude and latitude coordinates, but that would be better suited if we’re doing a symbol map for cities that are unrecognized by Tableau. Once all the edits are made hit “OK”.
Step 3: Legend and Final Touches
Once the previous step is complete, we can drag the sheet into a dashboard view so we can make a few customizations. Some countries that Chhetri has scored against are really small so I recommend labeling countries like Guam, Puerto Rico, Curacao, etc under the “Marks” section. To add a goals legend, under “ Analysis” hover over “Legends” and this should appear(refer to Figure 5). Click on the “Color Legend” and it should appear. The legend will appear on the right, select on “Floating” so we can drag it wherever we want. We can also change the colors under “ Edit Colors”(refer to Figure 6).
In “Edit Colors” under “Palette” we can customize the color. I recommend Custom Sequential for this example. Hit “Advanced” and the “Start” and “End” boxes should pop up. Make sure to make the “Start” number 0 so the countries that Chhetri has scored against have color filled in rather than being filled in white. Hit “OK” once everything is customized to your liking.
After adding the title and his total stats, here is the final product!
Hope this tutorial was fun to do, feedback and shares appreciated!
DM me @FcAyushNarayan on Twitter if you have any questions :)