Clearly and Simply

Tag: tableau software

  • Tableau Custom Geocoding outside the US and UK

    How to properly import a custom geocoding into Tableau for countries outside the US and the UK

    Postcode Map GermanyI am using Tableau for more than 3 years now and I am living in Germany. To my own surprise I noticed these days that I never used the Import Custom Geocoding feature of Tableau Software. Don’t ask me why. I always had the latitudes and longitudes in the underlying database, I guess.

    A couple of days back, however, a colleague of mine asked for my assistance. He tried to make German postcodes available as a new geographic role in Tableau Software by using Custom Geocoding. He hit a roadblock: it simply didn’t work.

    Thus, I had a look at this feature for the very first time and I faced the same problem: I couldn’t manage to properly import the data. More precisely: I couldn’t import the Custom Geocoding at all!

    Even following a step-by-step tutorial described in the Tableau Knowledge Base (Importing Numeric Geographical Roles) led to the same issue: no import of the Custom Geocoding possible. Problems like this simply drive me nuts. After digging deeper into this, I finally found the root cause of the problem and a solution.

    Today’s post describes how to properly import Custom Geocoding data in Tableau Software, if you are living outside of the US and the UK. The article is based on the example of German postcodes (“Postleitzahlen”, “PLZ2” and “PLZ5”), but the technique should be applicable to any other data set as well.

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  • The Power of Tableau Actions

    How to create highly interactive Tableau dashboards using actions: a step-by-step tutorial and an example workbook

    Action - Tableau ClapperboardEven if you are creating the most basic chart with Tableau Software, the visualization already includes a great set of interactive features without the need for using special functionality: clicking on a data point highlights this point and shades off all others. Clicking on an entry in a color legend highlights all data points belonging to this category. Hovering over data points displays tooltips with all used underlying data, and so forth.

    However, Tableau offers even more than that: Tableau actions. Basically, actions are Tableau’s way of sending user interactions across the workbook. The user selects a data point of one visualization and actions give you full control of what is supposed to happen on the other visualizations and worksheets.

    Today’s post includes a detailed how-to tutorial on the power of Tableau actions:

    • what are actions and what can you do with them,
    • what types of actions are possible and
    • a step-by-step tutorial on how to use actions on a dashboard

    The tutorial is based on example data of the 50 most prominent summits on earth and provides a Tableau Public visualization of the final result.

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