From the course: Tableau 10 for Data Scientists

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When to map your data

When to map your data - Tableau Tutorial

From the course: Tableau 10 for Data Scientists

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When to map your data

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- [Instructor] Just because we can map our data, should we? Are there times where mapping is actually the correct decision? Often, this depends what we're trying to do. Our data might have some useful geographic information into it, but often times it simply has the name of the country or the state, and mapping it isn't always the best option. Let's look at some examples of both good use of mapping and couple of bad ones. To start with, we'll look at this sales map. This is showing the amount of sales, per state, in the U.S.A. One of the issues that we have is that the geographic regions are all different sizes. The states on the Eastern Seaboard are all very small, so it's difficult to tell if they all have low sales or simply a small surface area. The larger states, such as Texas and California, with the larger block of colors, can dominate. Are we seeing a large amount of sales, or simply a larger land area? If we take Washington state and Texas, and compare the two, they look…

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