Create custom territories

- [Narrator] Tableau 10 introduced the idea of custom territories. This is a great way of grouping together geographic regions when this information isn't present in the original data source. To see it in action, let's look at our superstore sales data. Here, we have a map showing the amount of sales for each state and it's color-coded on region. All this information is present in our current data source. Custom territories allow us to re-define these regions and treat them as one single area.

This is really useful and not only do we not have to go back to the original data source, we might not be able to change the original data source. So we can do all of the regional coding within Tableau itself. Let's see how this works. To start, we're gonna choose a map. We'll just drag State. And now we need to group our states together. To do this, we just select some states. We can draw a rubber band around some of them and then click Group. Tableau has now grouped these together in one single group and colored them blue.

The rest of them, a group called Other, is now colored gray. We can carry on grouping the rest of these together however we like. Now, we have our regional group selected. Tableau has created four separate groups and colored them accordingly. We can use a bit more detail if we change to a filled map. We're still looking at the State, so let's remove that and add the state group onto Color.

We now have our four distinct groups. If we add our sales information, we may hover over. We can now see how much each of these groups brought in in sales. Note that the groups don't have to be contiguous. We have some of the eastern states, California, and Florida in one group. Custom territories allow us to group the data in a way that wasn't present in the original data source. We can customize if any of our particular views. If we wanted to, we could regroup them in many different ways for many different applications without ever touching the original data source.

Custom territories also allow us to aggregate the data in total. Instead of looking at the individual state sales, we're now looking at the custom territories overall sales. We've aggregated all of the data together at this custom level we've just created. This is information it's not possible to do without custom territories as these do not exist in our original data source.