Learning Tableau

Now you have a way to compare each product over time without overwhelming the overlap. This is the start of a spark-lines visualization that will be developed more fully when advanced visualizations are discussed.
Remove the Product field from the Rows shelf to return to the first time series created in this exercise. Additionally, you may experiment with the undo button in the toolbar.
Geographic visualizations
Tableau makes creating geographic visualizations very easy. The built-in geographic database allows any field recognized as playing a geographic role to define a latitude and longitude. This means that even if your data does not contain latitudes and longitudes, Tableau will provide them for you based on fields such as Country, State, City, or Zip Code. If your data contains Latitude and Longitude fields, you may use them instead of the generated values.

Tip
Although most databases do not strictly define geographic roles for fields, Tableau will automatically assign geographic roles to fields based on the field name and a sampling of values in the data. You can assign or reassign geographic roles to any field by right-clicking on the field in the Data window and using the Geographic Role option. This is also a good way to see what built-in geographic roles are available.

The power and flexibility of Tableau's geographic capabilities as well as the options for customization will be covered in more detail in Chapter 10, Advanced Techniques, Tips, and Tricks. In the following examples, we'll consider some of the foundational concepts of geographic visualizing.

Geographic visualization is incredibly valuable when you need to understand where things happen and if there are any spatial relationships within the data. Tableau offers two basic forms of geographic visualization:

Filled maps
Symbol maps
Filled maps
Filled maps, as the name implies, make use of filled areas, such as the country, state, county or zip code, to show the location. The color that fills the area can be used to encode values of measures or dimensions.

What if you want to understand profit for your coffee chain and see whether there are any patterns geographically? Let's take a look at some examples of how you might do this:

Create a new sheet and name it Profit by Location.
Double-click on the State field in the Data window. Tableau automatically creates a geographic visualization using the Latitude (generated), Longitude (generated), and State fields.

Stacked bars are useful when you want to understand part-to-whole relationships.