Sparklines on Maps

One of the exciting new features shipping with Tableau 4.0 is support for map based visualisations. You may have seen demonstrations that place marks such as shapes, circles and even pie charts on maps. But did you know that you can also put small line graphs called sparklines on maps? It takes a bit of work, but with this recipe you can do just that and visualise your own geographically arranged trends.

Sparklines - Easier Than I Thought

I recently had to look at a lot of data categories as their values moved through time. I wanted to embed these graphs in a Word document to succinctly and effectively provide visual context to my discussion points. I originally thought I would use one graph with multiple color-encoded lines but realized that it would not be very effective in my document. There were too many lines overlapping each other and you couldn't really discern what was happening for each category.

I remembered what Edward Tufte and Stephen Few recommend - sparklines - and used Tableau to create them quickly and easily.