Monday, October 22, 2012

Miscellaneous Mapping Vexations

Tableau doesn't recognize the following as legitimate geographic entities:

  • England
  • Wales
  • Scotland
  • Ireland
  • Northern Ireland
  • Antilles
  • Ascension Island
  • Azores
  • Canary Islands
  • Herzegovina
  • Northern Marianas

It's really hard to accept that England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and Northern Ireland aren't geographically legitimate.

While we're here, the UI for providing lat/long values is pretty weak.

  • It doesn't accept vales in the form "13°10′N 61°14′W", or at least it didn't work for me. Tableau should be smart enough to parse this form.
  • And even when the lat/long are available in the form "51.481581,-3.17909" you can't simply paste them from the clipboard into the up front field, you have to go through the bother of entering them individually into their separate lat and long text areas as a secondary action.

Tableau has made great progress in its mapping abilities in the past few releases, but there's still plenty of lubricating to be done.

1 comment:

  1. I like the idea of having a flexible input, that parses a free text input box and displays how it interpreted the input as confirmation.

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