There's a good chance you are misrepresenting your data if you're using filled CBSA/MSA maps

tableaucommunity@tableau.com — Sat, 22 Mar 2014 12:05:27 GMT

Question: Is there any way at all to get Tableau Public to display the 2009 CMSA/MSA boundaries instead of the 2013 ones?

Background:

I kind of happened upon this by accident. First off, I should say that I use Tableau Desktop Professional to build my visualizations and upload them to a Tableau Public (Premium) account. Today I uploaded a viz of some basic 2010 MSA-level U.S. Census figures for Florida. I had included a basic filled map of Florida's MSAs, and when I looked at the final uploaded product, I noticed something peculiar: the borders of some of the MSAs on the uploaded map were different than the ones I saw on Desktop Professional when I created it. Take a look at the attached PNG images and see if you can spot the differences. I'll wait.

.....

What you should see is that on the Public map, two of the MSAs in the Florida Panhandle have added an extra county to their borders, and the Palm Coast MSA in northeast Florida appears to have been swallowed by its neighbor to the south.

It was immediately apparent to me, since I work with a lot of economic and demographic data, what was going on. Essentially, the Public viz is displaying the most current (2013) MSA delineations, while my Desktop software is displaying the previous MSA names and delineations, which were set in 2009. (The U.S. Office of Management and Budget is the entity that determines the definitions, criteria, names, and delineations for MSAs and CBSAs). My guess is that the maps simply have yet to be updated in Desktop--feel free to correct me if I'm wrong about that. But if I''m right, does the same go for the Tableau Public application, I wonder?

In any case, this got me thinking, most of the MSA data out there right now still uses the 2009 definitions. Like most of the stuff you'll find on the census bureau's website. (For instance, if you download MSA-level data from the American FactFinder at www.census.gov for the 2010 Decennial Census or the most recent American Community Survey (just released in Sept. 2013) you will find that it uses the 2009 names and delineations.) This seems to be the case for most other common sources of economic and demographic data, too. For example, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics is still reporting employment figures at the MSA level using the 2009 names and delineations.

Bottom line: there's very little data out there at this point that even uses the 2013 MSA definitions yet. So chances are, if you're using MSA data in Tableau Public right now, you've got the wrong vintage of MSA maps, my friends. It's not always easy to notice, either, because a lot of MSA names and delineations have stayed the same. But not in all cases--just look at the changes in Florida, which I've included in the attached PDF.

So, again I ask, is there any way I can get the 2009 maps back into my Tableau Public viz?

Removing functions from toolbar in embedded visualization (Public Premium)

tableaucommunity@tableau.com — Sun, 16 Mar 2014 23:06:20 GMT

I'm using Tableau Desktop 8.1 to create workbooks and publish them to a Tableau Public Premium account.

Since I'm using Public Premium, for each of my workbooks I have the following Footer Settings available:

Show Toolbar
Show author byline
Let others download this workbook and its data

For one of my published workbooks, I want to remove the share buttons (i.e. the little Twitter/Facebook/email/embed icons) in the toolbar, but not the toolbar itself, as I would like to retain the "Export" and "Revert All" buttons. Unchecking the "Show Toolbar" option doesn't affect the share buttons. Are the share buttons a permanent fixture?

And no, Tableau Server is unfortunately not an option for me.

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There's a good chance you are misrepresenting your data if you're using filled CBSA/MSA maps

Removing functions from toolbar in embedded visualization (Public Premium)