How to Get Map in Tableau

Creating a map in Tableau is one of the quickest ways to see the geographic patterns hidden in your spreadsheet. Instead of just seeing a list of states or cities in a table, you can instantly visualize where your customers are, which regions are driving sales, or where you should focus your next marketing campaign. This tutorial will walk you through how to create and customize maps in Tableau, step by step.

First Things First: Prepare Your Geographical Data

Tableau is incredibly smart when it comes to location data, but it can’t work miracles with a messy file. Before you even open Tableau, the best thing you can do is make sure your data is clean and clearly labeled. Tableau automatically recognizes common location names for fields like:

• Country
• State or Province
• City
• ZIP Code or Postal Code
• County
• Airport Code

When Tableau identifies a field with this kind of data, it assigns it a geographic role, which you'll see as a small globe icon next to the field name in the Data pane. For best results, organize your spreadsheet with distinct columns for each geographic level. For example, instead of having a single "Location" column with "San Diego, CA, USA", split it into three separate columns: "City", "State", and "Country". This eliminates ambiguity and helps Tableau plot your data points accurately on the first try.

What if Tableau Doesn't Recognize a Geographic Field?

Sometimes a field name isn’t standard, like "Store Location" instead of "City". If you don’t see the globe icon, you can manually assign a geographic role. Just right-click the field in the Data pane, hover over Geographic Role, and select the correct role from the list (e.g., City, State/Province, etc.). This tells Tableau exactly how to interpret the data in that column.

How to Create a Basic Point Map (Symbol Map)

A point map, also known as a symbol map, is the most common map type. It places a dot or another symbol at a specific geographic location. This is perfect for visualizing things like individual store locations, customer addresses, or earthquake epicenters.

Let's walk through creating one using a sample dataset of sales figures for different US cities.

Step 1: Connect to Your Data Source

First, open Tableau and connect to your data file (e.g., an Excel or CSV file). Once your data is loaded, you’ll see your columns listed as Dimensions and Measures in the Data pane on the left side of the worksheet.

Step 2: Start Building the Map

This is where Tableau’s intelligence shines. To create a map, all you need to do is double-click a geographic field.

Let's use our State field. When you double-click State, Tableau automatically does three things:

1. It adds Longitude to the Columns shelf and Latitude to the Rows shelf.
2. It places State onto the Detail shelf on the Marks card.
3. It displays a map with a single point plotted for each state in your dataset.

That's it - you have a map! It’s basic, but it’s a starting point. Right now, every point is the same size and color, which doesn't tell us much. The next step is to add data to make it insightful.

Step 3: Add Detail with Size and Color

To make the map useful, we want the points to represent a measure, like sales or profit. This is done by dragging and dropping fields onto the Marks card.

• Vary the Size: Find your Sales measure and drag it onto the Size shelf on the Marks card. Instantly, the dots on the map will resize. States with higher sales now have larger circles, giving you a quick visual reference for top-performing regions.
• Vary the Color: Now, let's add another layer of information. Drag your Profit measure onto the Color shelf. Tableau will automatically apply a color gradient. Typically, it will show higher profits in a shade of blue or green and lower profits (or losses) in a shade of orange or red.

Now, with just a few drags and drops, your map tells a much richer story. You can immediately spot which states have the largest sales (big circles) and whether those sales are actually profitable (color of the circles).

How to Create a Filled Map (Choropleth Map)

While point maps are great for specific locations, sometimes you want to visualize an entire region. This is where a filled map, or choropleth map, comes in. Instead of plotting a point, a filled map shades the entire area of a state, country, or sales territory. It’s perfect for showing voting results by county or sales performance by state.

Let's turn our point map into a filled map.

Step 1: Change the Mark Type

On the Marks card, you’ll see a dropdown menu that is likely set to 'Automatic'. Click on it and select Map from the list.

Tableau will automatically change your visualization. Because we have our State field on the Detail shelf, Tableau knows the boundaries for each state and will shade them accordingly based on the measure you have on the Color shelf (in our case, Profit).

Step 2: Interpret and Refine the View

The dark and light shades of a color gradient make it easy to spot trends. For instance, you might see that the West Coast is a shade of dark blue (high profit), while some states in the South are orange (unprofitable). This is a powerful, at-a-glance insight that's much harder to get from a simple table of data.

A Quick Tip: Filled maps work best when your geographic data represents well-defined areas. They're great for states, countries, and ZIP codes. They are not ideal for individual cities, as most city boundaries are not pre-loaded into Tableau and would just appear as circles anyway.

Customizing Your Map for Better Storytelling

A basic map is functional, but with a few simple tweaks, you can make it more professional, readable, and context-rich.

Map Layers and Background Styles

To control the look of your map, navigate to the menu bar at the top and click on Map > Map Layers. This opens a configuration pane on the left side of your workspace where you can:

• Change the Style: Switch between Light, Dark, or Normal backgrounds. A dark background can make your data colors pop, while a Streets style might provide helpful context.
• Add or Remove Layers: You can choose to show or hide details like state borders, street names, county lines, and even coastline data. Add layers that support the story you're telling and remove any that add unnecessary clutter.

Improving Your Tooltips

A tooltip is the small information box that appears when you hover over a mark on your map. By default, it shows the data you're already using in the view. You can customize it to be much more informative.

Simply drag any other field from your Data pane onto the Tooltip shelf on the Marks card. For example, you could drag Sales, Profit Ratio, and Customer Segment to the tooltip. Now, when a user hovers over a state, they get a complete snapshot beyond what's visually represented.

Handling Unrecognized or Ambiguous Locations

Sooner or later, you'll run into a common Tableau problem: a small grey indicator appears in the bottom-right corner of your map saying "# unknown". This means Tableau couldn’t figure out one or more of your locations.

Click on the indicator, and a dialog box will pop up. Choose Edit Locations. This typically happens for a few reasons:

• Ambiguity: You have a city name like "Paris" in your data. Tableau needs to know if you mean Paris, Texas, or Paris, France. In the Edit Locations dialog, you might see "Unrecognized" next to Paris. You can fix this by specifying that your data comes from a fixed country (e.g., USA) or by mapping it to the state it belongs to if you have that data in another column.
• Misspellings or Nicknames: Typos like "Los Angles" or alternate spellings like "St. Louis" instead of "Saint Louis" can cause confusion. You can manually match the unrecognized term in your data to the correct location known by Tableau.

Fixing these is usually a quick, one-time setup that ensures your map is always accurate.

Final Thoughts

Learning to build maps is a fundamental skill in Tableau that can transform how you see and understand location-based data. By formatting your data correctly and using the Marks card to layer in details like size and color, you can go from a simple spreadsheet to a powerful, interactive visual in just a few minutes.

While mastering specialized tools like Tableau is valuable for a deep dive, we built Graphed for those moments when you just need quick and clean dashboards from all your marketing and sales platforms without the manual effort. Instead of connecting CSVs or spending time customizing marks and layers, you can build an entire analytics dashboard with simple, conversational language - like asking, "Just show me sessions by state for the last 90 days as a map."