How to Create a Symbol Map in Tableau

A symbol map is one of the most effective ways to tell a story with your geographic data, instantly showing where your key business activities are happening. This article will walk you through exactly how to create a symbol map in Tableau, customize it to highlight key insights, and troubleshoot common issues along the way.

What Exactly Is a Symbol Map?

In Tableau, a symbol map represents individual geographic locations with marks - like circles, squares, stars, or even custom shapes. Unlike a filled map, which colors entire areas like countries or states, a symbol map places a specific point right where an action occurred. The size, color, and shape of these symbols can then be used to visualize additional data dimensions.

For example, you could use a symbol map to:

• Plot store locations across the country, with larger symbols representing stores with higher sales.
• Visualize customer addresses in a city, with different colors for different customer segments.
• Track shipping origins, where the color of each symbol indicates whether the shipment was on-time or delayed.

Symbol maps are powerful because they're precise. They show you the exact "where" in your data, making them ideal for analyzing performance at a specific longitude and latitude, address, city, or postal code.

Preparing Your Data for Tableau Maps

Before you can build a map, Tableau needs to understand your geographical data. This process, known as geocoding, relies on data columns that contain location information. Tableau is smart, but it needs your help to work its magic.

Geographic Roles are Essential

Tableau automatically recognizes common geographic field names like "Country," "State," "City," and "Zip Code." When you connect your data source, look for a small globe icon next to these fields in the Data pane. This means Tableau has assigned it a geographic role.

If you have a field that contains city names but it’s named something like "Customer Town," Tableau might not recognize it automatically. You can easily fix this. Just right-click the field, hover over Geographic Role, and select the appropriate role (e.g., City).

Keep Your Location Data Clean

Your map’s accuracy depends entirely on your data quality. The most common pitfall is ambiguity. For example, there are dozens of cities named "Springfield" in the United States. If your data only lists the city, Tableau won't know which one to plot.

To avoid this, always include more specific geographic fields. A good dataset for mapping typically includes columns for different levels of geographic detail. Here’s a simple example structure:

Store ID, City, State, Country, Sales, Profit 1001, Los Angeles, CA, USA, 54000, 8500 1002, Vancouver, BC, Canada, 32000, 4100 1003, London, NULL, UK, 78000, 12300 1004, Springfield, IL, USA, 21000, -500

By including State and Country, you give Tableau the necessary context to plot "Springfield, IL" correctly without confusing it with "Springfield, MA."

Step-by-Step Guide: Creating Your First Symbol Map

Let's build a basic symbol map showing sales performance by city. For this example, we’ll use a simple dataset with fields for City, State, Country, Sales, and Profit.

Step 1: Connect to Your Data Source

First, open Tableau and connect to your data (e.g., an Excel file, Google Sheet, or database). Once loaded, your data fields will appear in the Data pane on the left side of the worksheet.

Step 2: Generate the Basic Map

The fastest way to create a map is to leverage Tableau's "Show Me" feature or simply use drag-and-drop. Find your primary geographic field - in this case, City - and double-click it.

Tableau will automatically do two things:

1. It places Longitude (generated) on the Columns shelf and Latitude (generated) on the Rows shelf.
2. It creates a map view and places a symbol (a dot) at each city location present in your data.

You now have a basic symbol map! Each dot represents a city, but right now, it’s not telling us much. All the symbols are identical.

Step 3: Use Size and Color to Show Insights

This is where your map comes to life. To make it meaningful, you need to encode your business metrics using the Marks card.

• Control Size with a Measure: Let's make the symbol size reflect the total sales in each city. Find the Sales measure in the Data pane and drag it onto the Size button on the Marks card. Instantly, the symbols will change size, with larger circles representing cities with higher sales.
• Control Color with a Measure or Dimension: Now let's use color to show profitability. Drag the Profit measure onto the Color button. By default, Tableau will apply a diverging color palette (often orange-blue), where one color shows positive profit and the other shows negative profit. Cities with bigger, darker blue circles are your top performers!

Just like that, you've transformed a simple map of locations into a rich visualization that tells a clear story about sales and profitability across different markets.

Step 4: Customize Your Symbols

Don’t like the default circles? The Marks card gives you full control. Click the dropdown menu that currently says Automatic and select Shape. Now, you can drag a categorical field (like Region) onto the Shape button to assign a different shape to each region, or click the Shape button to select a new default shape for all your symbols.

Taking Your Symbol Map to the Next Level

With the basics down, you can add more layers of detail and interactivity to make your map even more powerful for your end-users.

Customize Your Tooltips

Tooltips are the information boxes that appear when you hover your mouse over a data point. By default, they show the fields used in the view, but you can customize them to provide a clearer, more concise summary.

Click on the Tooltip button in the Marks card. This opens an editor where you can type, format text, and insert field values. For example, you could format your tooltip to read:

City: <,City>, <,State> Total Sales: $<SUM(Sales)> Profit: $<SUM(Profit)>

This little enhancement makes your map much easier for others to understand at a glance.

Use Custom Shapes

Go beyond the built-in shapes (circles, squares, stars) by using your own images as symbols. Imagine a map plotting your store locations, each marked with your company's logo. To do this, simply add your image files to the Shapes folder within your My Tableau Repository folder on your computer. After reloading shapes in Tableau, your custom images will be available to select. This branding element can make your dashboard look incredibly professional.

Add Filters for Interactivity

A static map is useful, but an interactive one is even better. Drag a dimension like Region or Product Category from the Data pane onto the Filters card. Now a filter control will appear, allowing you or your audience to select specific regions or categories to focus on. For instance, they could filter the map to see data for only the "West" region, causing all other symbols to disappear.

Common Issues and How to Fix Them

Even seasoned analysts run into mapping issues. Here are two of the most common problems and their solutions.

1. Unrecognized Locations

Sometimes, a small gray null indicator appears in the bottom right corner of your map, saying you have "X unknown" locations. This can be intimidating, but it's usually an easy fix.

• Why it happens: This is almost always caused by misspellings, abbreviations, or ambiguous names in your dataset that Tableau can't match automatically.
• How to fix it: Click on the gray indicator and select Edit Locations. A dialog box will appear showing all the unrecognized locations from your data. You can now manually enter the correct location or match it to a known location within Tableau’s geographic database. Sometimes, you just need to specify that "USA" and "United States" in your data are the same country. Once you map them correctly, Tableau will remember the fix.

2. The Map is Too Crowded

If you're mapping thousands of data points, your symbols might overlap and turn into an unreadable blob, a problem often called "over-plotting."

• Why it happens: Too many individual marks in a small geographic area makes it impossible to distinguish one from another.
• How to fix it:

Final Thoughts

Symbol maps are an essential visualization type in Tableau for anyone working with geographic data. By mapping your data points and encoding them with size, color, and shapes, you can reveal spatial patterns and share location-based insights that would be lost in a simple bar chart or spreadsheet.

While tools like Tableau offer powerful visualization capabilities, we know there's often a significant learning curve and a time-consuming process to get from raw data to a finished report. That’s why we built Graphed. It lets you create the same powerful, real-time dashboards by simply describing what you want to see in plain English. Instead of clicking through menus and dragging fields, you can just ask, “Create a map showing our sales by city for last quarter,” and get an interactive dashboard instantly.