Here is how you can replicate what we did:įor use in Python, the table should have the following columns: origin latitude, origin longitude, destination latitude, destination longitude, route name. The script is fairly straightforward and it shouldn’t require a lot of adjustments when one wants to apply it to other data sets. There are different ways to go about it, but we used Python for this exercise. In our case we weren’t happy with what we found, so we decided to build our own spatial file. Often a quick internet search will yield a spatial file for your need. The spatial file connector also mitigates the second problem, as it is designed to optimize the rendering of the lines so that the smoothness of the curve is appropriate for the zoom level. With linear-geography spatial files, one can now completely prevent the first problem: We can get one mark for each route that highlights as a whole when hovered over or tapped on. ![]() Enter the new and improved spatial file connector This approach has two small drawbacks: a) when hovering over the lines Tableau highlights the intermediate dots, not the whole route, and b) because we are adding more rows to the data and more marks to the view, the performance of the published viz might decrease. But all of these rely on creating coordinates for enough intermediate points between the origin and destination so that the connected line appears curved to the human eye. Many ingenious workarounds to create such curved lines have been described by the talented Tableau community (e.g. Of course, on world maps flight routes are often depicted as arcs – the so-called great circle connections that represent the shortest distance between two points on a globe. However, as you can see in the screenshot above, it comes with a small fly in the ointment: the airports are connected by straight lines. Traditional approaches to great-circle paths In fact, given that Tableau maps can plot airports based on their IATA codes, we had created a first flight route map in less than a minute! It is easy enough to download this information as text files (.dat files), and open it in Tableau. We came across the OpenFlights Database that has information on all the airports, airlines, and flight routes of the world. Here we’d like to show how we recently created a KML file containing all the flight routes of the world. As we have seen in the launch announcement for Tableau Public 10.4, examples of linear Shapefiles, KML files or GeoJSON files abound.īut what if your network data is not yet in such a file format? It is actually not that difficult to create these file formats yourself, whether that is in a GIS tool or using a programming language such as R or Python. With the Tableau spatial file connector now also supporting linear geographies - in addition to points and polygones - such infrastructure networks can now be easily plotted in Tableau. In our ever more connected world, more and more data is about the flow of people, of goods, and of information. Reference Materials Toggle sub-navigation. ![]()
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