DMAs not shaping up

tableaucommunity@tableau.com — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 11:21:32 GMT

Good morning.

I've seen a number of posts regarding topics like DMA maps, using customer shapefiles with Tableau, and choropleth maps. Through them, I've made a lot of progress on my primary goal: DMA map in tableau. My issue is that some of the DMAs are shaped correctly. For instance, see Denver in the attached file.

The steps, I've used:

1. Acquire DMA shapefile.

2. Used QGIS to simplify the shapefile as it was to large to complete the other steps with any speed in Tableau.

3. Used QGIS with MMQGIS to export the nodes and attributes. I also did this with SAS (proc mapimport).

4. Opened the exported files and added a column for point_id, sequential values for a each DMA to tell Tableau how to create the polygons

5. Accessed the file from above with Tableau and created the polygons.

Am I missing something obvious? I'm betting that the way I created the point_id in step 4 above is not correct. Meaning that I can't just take the order of the data as it comes from QGIS or SAS.

My goal is to use software already on my laptop as this is a somewhat locked-down environment. This means things like SAS, R, QGIS, and Tableau.

After I figure this, I'd like to see how I can group the DMA's into 5 custom regions. My goal here is to show regional data without any DMA lines. My guess is that I would need a customized shapefile/coordinates for each region to do this.

Thank you - Brian

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DMAs not shaping up