Tableau Map Report

Question

I am working on creating a map sales report to show the sales by product for various territories. The territories are based upon zip codes and are custom territories that overflow into multiple states or are partially in a state. I have gotten everything set up and it looks good for the most part...EXCEPT 2 areas.

1.) one of the sales numbers shows up in Alaska which is not viewable if a user is zoomed in on the USA (we are US-based so it's only relevant to show anyways). Is there a way to force a sales number to show up on a user-defined location? For instance, can I show this on the State of Washington instead of Alaska or can it only default to the largest (area) part of a user-created territory map?

2.) being that we are US-based is there a way to move the states Alaska and Hawaii closer to the US? I know that utilizing the dashboard is a workaround, but it does not look good.

Answer 1

I'm not sure this could be a complete answer, but I think this question has more than one take.

That being said, if your worksheet is based on zip codes in order to create a map, I don't think you can force Tableau to visualize data out of their original position based on the specific geographic role. The only thing that come to my mind is switching your approach from geographical role (country, state, city, zip, etc) to a more generic lat/long coordinates. Doing so, you can manually match your Alaska zip codes to lat/long more "continental" areas. Anyway this would require a lot of data manipulation prior to Tableau.

An alternative way of accomplish something similar to what you say in your second point could lead you to use 3 seperate worksheets in a single dashboard: continental, Alaska, Hawaii.

I did something on US data and I was facing the same problem for Hawaii, so I decided to use a floating worksheet putting it on the bottom left corner of the continental map.