Using Zipcodes With Maps

Quick reference

• 00:04 In this video I want to look at zip codes.
• 00:06 And if we look at our show me thing, we can see if we hover over these two things
• 00:11 right here we have symbol maps and maps.
• 00:13 And one of the nice things about Tableau is you can use maps based on
• 00:17 geolocation data, latitude, longitude, zip codes, things like that.
• 00:22 But this is all grayed out, and you'll notice that owner zip,
• 00:26 zip codes, is listed as a measure.
• 00:28 This is kind of weird, right, because a zip code is not a numerical value,
• 00:33 right, we're not counting zip codes.
• 00:36 A zip code is descriptive, I live in Las Vegas the zip code is 89129,
• 00:41 that's not a numerical value that means something, I can't add one zip code
• 00:46 to another zip code and get a summed total, right, that's not what this is.
• 00:51 It's not really a numerical type of thing, this is really a descriptive thing,
• 00:55 this should really be a dimension, it should be up here.
• 00:57 So we're going to just come over here, and there's a couple of different ways we
• 01:02 can do this, we could set the geographical role.
• 01:07 And you can see it has a bunch of different options, well, latitude,
• 01:12 longitude, airport codes, a zip code and post code, so
• 01:16 that's what this is supposed to be so I'm just going to go ahead and click that.
• 01:21 And you can see, boom, it's no longer listed in here, the owner zip is now up in
• 01:26 dimensions, it's all blued out, and what we do have is a latitude and a longitude
• 01:30 that have been generated for us by Tableau based on that zip code information.
• 01:35 So that's really cool, we can now use this stuff
• 01:38 as a map type thing to show representations in our visualization.
• 01:43 So let's bring in our count, and let's bring in our owner zip, and
• 01:47 maybe we want to turn these around, it really doesn't matter.
• 01:52 And we can see a list of all the dogs that are registered in each zip code,
• 01:55 it doesn't mean a whole lot to us, but now we can use these maps.
• 01:58 So if we click on this we can see, boom, here's a map of the US,
• 02:02 we've got a little legend here on the side.
• 02:05 And I'm just going to sort of hover over here and with my mouse sort of scroll in,
• 02:10 and we can sort of break this down.
• 02:12 Now we knew these are from Pennsylvania, we can see there's Pennsylvania, and
• 02:16 very cool.
• 02:18 Now we can click over here, we could change it to this other map, and this sort
• 02:23 of breaks it down geospatially a little bit differently, but very, very cool.
• 02:33 We can add the breed as colors and really get crazy.
• 02:38 So very, very interesting.
• 02:40 And you can see, it's not just Pennsylvania it looks like, interesting.
• 02:45 So that's zip code,
• 02:46 just be aware that you're really probably going to have to convert zip code.
• 02:52 Because Tableau makes a good best guess whenever you import data, and
• 02:55 I tend to notice that it kind of gets a little confused from time to time with zip
• 02:59 codes, it tries to make it into a measure when it's really not.
• 03:02 This latitude and longitude is a measure,
• 03:04 those are numerical values that mean something numerically.
• 03:08 A zip code doesn't mean anything numerically,
• 03:10 it really should be a dimension, it's more of a descriptive thing than anything.
• 03:14 And that's how we do that, so that's all for this video.
• 03:16 In the next video, we'll look at adding dates and drilling down by date.

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