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David,

Surely this is not the best approach, but may work (at least in my feeble mind I see it). Certainly, any and all challenges/corrections/other comments are welcome:

1. For each RegionCollect the lat/long pair for the counties or zip codes or zip+4s (daunting) or some other known geography contained therein.
2. Average the lats and longs (note that longs are negative our hemisphere), so that you have a pseudo-centroid for each.
3. Build a table with Region, Lat, Long
4. In Tableau, assign the appropriate Geographic Role to Lat and Long.
5. Place Lat on the row shelf and Long on the column shelf to get a default map having one mark at each Region centroid. No custom polygons right now, but c'est la vie, and Tableau is not finished with mapping by a long shot.
6. Save as a default workbook with the one worksheet.
7. For each data table of interest, add that table, joining to the Lat/Long table on Region.
8. Drop measures or dimensions on the map, and have fun.

Surely there is a better way, but this might work.

Another approach is to build a WMS map layer with your region polygons for background enhancement (see the Tableau blog article on this subject).
.
MANY BLESSINGS!
Peace and All Good!
Michael W Cristiani
Market Intelligence Group
mike@migsite.com

Yes, WMS is the way to go if you want a nice custom map background. To go along with that, you should be able to create a data mapping for your regions - be it zip codes, states, account names - if you don't already have a region attached to each of your records (which I'd hope you already do).