Tableau as a dashboarding tool offers a wide range of chart options for its users. One of the more impressive features in Tableau is without a doubt its built-in basemap services to render geospatial datasets:
However, for instances when none of the Tableau’s built-in map services displays the details your dashboard is trying to capture (e.g. street names, building footprints, certain terrain & water bodies), it would then be necessary to turn to other means to render these features instead.
As such, rather than relying on any other Tableau compatible basemap service file(s) for import, a more straightforward alternative could be plotting a custom background map image instead:
An Open-Sourced Utility Tool – Link to Web Application
For the past couple of geospatial use-cases I have encountered, as a means to handle occasions when the dashboard’s default map services fail to render the geo-features required, I had instead sought a workaround by deploying a web functionality to export any custom map image alongside the corresponding coordinate values required for input into Tableau’s background image import feature. The 3 steps to perform this workaround shall be illustrated in the subsequent section.
Summary of Steps – 3 Steps in total
Step 1. Navigate to the web app at either (1) Glitch or a backup link at (2) Render. Select the tab [🌐 Spatial⇢CSV] in the above navigation bar and scroll to the bottom where the following or the alike shall be displayed:
Step 2. Feel free to change the custom basemap url in the input field according (Note: Custom basemap URL must follow the slippy map tiles format – {z}/{x}/{y}.png) to switch to a basemap of your choice:
Step 3. Finally, after zooming and panning to the map view you desire, proceed to select the green button – [Export Map Image] and (very important!) please take note of the coordinates upon export of the map image:
Proceed to select your saved image and based on the background map image displayed at the beginning of this article, the final result should be similar to the below after the correct coordinates have been specified:
And there you have it! Congrats on plotting the map image successfully! ❤ Hope you have found this article useful and feel free to follow me on Medium if you would like more Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Data Analytics & Web application-related content. Would really appreciate it – 😀
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For more Tableau tricks and workarounds, please feel free to check out the below list of articles:
How To Render Mixed Geometry Types in Tableau in 2 Simple Steps
Leverage on D3.js v4 to build a Network Graph for Tableau with ease
Selective Formatting of Numbers in Tableau
5 Lesser Known Tableau Tips, Tricks & Hacks. With Use-Case + Demo.
Superscript and Subscript in Tableau – Why and How you can implement it
Underrated Combined Functionalities of Tableau – Point, LineString & Polygon Mapping