Location Data that Tableau Supports for Building Map Views
Tableau supports worldwide airport codes, cities, countries, regions, territories, states, provinces and some postcodes and second-level administrative districts (county-equivalents). US area codes, Core Based Statistical Areas (CBSA), Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSA), Congressional districts and Zip codes are also supported by Tableau. Additionally, any latitude and longitude coordinates are supported, as long as they are in decimal degrees.
Note: See About Tableau Maps(Link opens in a new window) on the Tableau website for a complete list of location data by country that Tableau supports.
What to do if Tableau doesn't recognise your location data
- If Tableau recognises your location data and automatically assigns geographic roles to your fields (you'll know this has happened because there will be a globe icon
next to them in the Data pane), then you're ready to build a map view. Just double-click one of those geographic fields and you've got a map. If Tableau does not immediately recognise your location data, and you can't build a map view, you'll need to assign geographic roles to your fields. See the Assign a geographic role to a field section to learn how.
Note: This procedure only works if your location data is supported by Tableau. If your data isn't supported by Tableau, there are a couple of things you can try in the meantime to map that data in Tableau:
Edit location names in your data source to match Tableau location names(Link opens in a new window)
Use spatial data to build a map view(Link opens in a new window)
Note: Connecting to spatial data is only supported on Tableau Desktop version 10.2 and later.