How to Make a County Map in Tableau

Creating a map that shows your data by county is an incredibly effective way to uncover hidden local trends, whether you're tracking sales performance, marketing engagement, or operational metrics. Unlike a state-level view, a county map gives you a granular, high-resolution picture of what’s happening on the ground. This tutorial will walk you through the entire process of building a detailed, interactive county map in Tableau, from preparing your data sheet to customizing the final visualization.

Why Map Your Data by County?

Columns of city and state names in a spreadsheet can feel abstract. Plotting that information on a map brings it to life. A state-level view is a good starting point, but often a single state can contain wildly different markets, demographics, and customer behaviors. A county-level view offers a compelling middle ground - it’s detailed enough to reveal meaningful patterns without being overwhelmingly granular like a zip code map.

Here are a few practical examples of how a county map can deliver a powerful story:

• Sales Teams: Pinpoint top-performing sales territories and identify underserved counties that represent growth opportunities.
• Marketing Managers: See exactly where a digital campaign is gaining the most traction or where direct mail efforts are resonating with customers.
• E-commerce Businesses: Analyze product demand and shipping densities to optimize logistics and regional inventory.
• Public Sector Analysts: Track public health statistics, voter turnout, or resource allocation with geographic precision.

By moving beyond states and regions, you can make smarter, more localized decisions backed by a clear visualization of your data.

Preparing Your Data for a County Map

Before you even open Tableau, the most important step is ensuring your data is clean, properly formatted, and contains the right geographic information. Tableau is impressively smart, but it can only work with what you give it. Getting this part right will save you a ton of headaches later.

Key Data Fields You'll Need

• County Name: Should be a text field containing the county name (e.g., "Los Angeles County", "Cook County"). Be mindful of variations like "St." vs. "Saint" - consistency is your friend.
• State or Province: This column is essential. Without it, Tableau will get confused because many county names exist in multiple states. For instance, there are over 30 "Washington County" in the United States. Providing a state ("Washington County," "Oregon") clarifies the ambiguity. You can use full state names or two-letter abbreviations, Tableau recognizes both.
• A Measure: This is the numerical data you want to visualize on the map. It could be anything: sales figures, website sessions, customer count, average order value, etc.

Optional but Recommended: FIPS Codes

For even greater accuracy, you can include FIPS codes. A FIPS code is a unique five-digit number assigned by the government to every county in the US. For example, the FIPS code for Los Angeles County, California is 06037. Using FIPS codes guarantees that Tableau will correctly identify every county without any guesswork, eliminating ambiguity completely. While not required for most maps, they are the gold standard for geographic accuracy at the county level.

Formatting Tips for Success

A little clean-up goes a long way. Before you connect your data to Tableau, do a quick check for common issues:

• Trim any leading or trailing spaces from your county and state names.
• Ensure consistent naming (e.g., pick either "DeSoto County" or "De Soto County" and use it everywhere).
• Check that your measure column contains only numerical data, with no text or currency symbols (you can format this in Tableau later).

Here's what a simple, well-structured dataset might look like:

Step-by-Step Guide: Creating Your Tableau County Map

With your data prepped and ready, it’s time to build the map. The process in Tableau is logical and surprisingly quick once you get the hang of it.

1. Connect to Your Data Source

Open Tableau Desktop. Under the "Connect" pane on the left, choose the type of file you're using. If you have a spreadsheet, click on Microsoft Excel or for a CSV, click on Text File. Locate your file and open it. Tableau will display a preview of your data source.

2. Assign Geographic Roles

This is where you tell Tableau that your columns of text aren't just words - they're geographic locations. This simple but critical step is what powers all of Tableau's mapping capabilities.

1. In the Data pane on the bottom-left sidebar, look for your fields under "Tables."
2. Find your County field. You will see a small "#" or "Abc" icon next to it. Right-click on the field name.
3. From the context menu, navigate to Geographic Role → County. The icon next to your field will change to a small globe, indicating Tableau now recognizes it as a geographic field.
4. Repeat this process for your State field. Right-click it, go to Geographic Role → State/Province, and confirm the icon changes.

You’ve just given Tableau the context it needs to plot your locations accurately.

3. Generate the Base Map

The fastest way to get a map started is to let Tableau do the work. Find your now-geographic County field in the data pane and double-click it.

Almost like magic, Tableau will automatically generate a map. It places generated Latitude and Longitude fields on the Rows and Columns shelves and plots a dot for each county in your data set. You should see a basic world map with marks appearing in the correct locations.

4. Create a Filled Map

Dots on a map are helpful, but a filled map, where the county shapes are colored in, is much more visually impactful. To change this:

• Look at the Marks card, located in the middle of the screen.
• You'll see a dropdown menu that currently says "Automatic" or "Shapes." Click this dropdown.
• Select Map from the list.

Instantly, your dots will transform into shaded county boundaries. Tableau’s underlying map data contains these shapes, and it's doing the work of matching your data points to the correct county polygons.

5. Add Your Data Measure

Your map now shows the location of your counties, but it doesn't represent your data yet. To bring it to life, you need to use your measure.

• Find your numerical measure (e.g., "Sales") in the Data pane.
• Drag this field and drop it directly onto the Color tile within the Marks card.

Tableau will automatically color each county based on the value of that measure. By default, it uses a blue sequential color gradient, so counties with lower sales will be a lighter shade of blue, and counties with higher sales will be a darker shade. A color legend will also appear on the right to explain the gradient.

Enhancing and Customizing Your Map

You now have a functional county map, but a few small enhancements can make it far more professional and easier for your audience to understand.

Adjusting Colors and the Legend

The default blue is fine, but you may want to use brand colors or a palette that tells a better story. To change the colors:

1. On the Marks card, click on the Color tile.
2. Select Edit Colors...
3. In the new window, click the palette dropdown to choose from dozens of built-in palettes, such as "Orange-Blue Diverging" (great for showing values above and below a central point) or "Red-Green Diverging."
4. Click OK to apply your new colors.

Adding More Detail with Tooltips

Tooltips are the informational pop-ups that appear when you hover over a mark (a county in this case). You can add more data to them to provide quick context without cluttering the map. For example, you might want to show the county name, state, and the exact sales figure.

• Simply drag any additional fields you want to show (like your "State" field or perhaps a "Leads" measure) from the Data pane and drop them onto the Tooltip tile on the Marks card. You can click on the Tooltip tile to further edit the text, organize the layout, and bold key information.

Using Filters to Drill Down

If your dataset covers the entire country, you can add filters to allow users to focus on specific regions or states. To do this:

• Drag a field like State from the data pane and drop it onto the Filters card.
• A dialog box will appear allowing you to select which states to include.
• After you make a selection, right-click the filter on the Filters card and choose Show Filter. This will add an interactive checklist or dropdown to the right side of your visualization, allowing anyone to easily explore the data.

Dealing with Common Tableau Map Issues

Sometimes, things don’t go perfectly on the first try. Here are a couple of the most common issues you might run into when making county maps and how to fix them.

Missing Counties or "X Unknown" Warning

You may see a small gray indicator in the bottom-right of your map that says something like "12 unknown." This means Tableau couldn't recognize some of your locations. This is almost always due to ambiguous naming (like the "Washington County" problem) or slight spelling mismatches.

• The Fix: Define the Geographic Hierarchy. The number one cause of this problem is not setting a geographic role for your State field. Your County and State fields work as a team. If you tell Tableau which state each county belongs to, it can almost always resolve the ambiguity.
• The Manual Fix: Edit Locations. If some are still unrecognized, click the gray "X Unknown" indicator. A dialog box will appear. Here, you can manually map your unrecognized location names to Tableau’s known locations. For example, if your data has "St. Claire County" and Tableau knows it as "Saint Clair County," you can match them here.

My Map is Just a Bunch of Dots!

If you've followed all the steps but are still looking at circles instead of filled shapes, the solution is simple. Go back to the Marks card, click the dropdown menu, and make sure you’ve manually selected Map. Sometimes "Automatic" defaults to shapes instead of polygons, but a quick switch will fix it.

Final Thoughts

Mapping your data at the county level in Tableau transforms a sterile spreadsheet into a compelling geographic story. It helps you see beyond national or state-level averages to understand the unique performance of local areas. By methodically preparing your data and following the steps to assign roles, build layers, and customize your view, you can create a powerful dashboard asset that truly highlights regional patterns.

While mastering Tableau is an incredibly valuable skill, we know there's a learning curve. Sometimes, you just need a clear map, fast, without spending an hour configuring data roles and tweaking settings. At Graphed, we created a tool to solve this exact problem. We enable you to connect data from a Google Sheet, CRM, or ad platform in seconds and create live dashboards simply by asking questions in plain English. Instead of over a dozen manual clicks, you can just ask, "Show me last quarter's revenue by county for California as a map," and instantly get an insightful, interactive visualization.