Introduction

I work with a lot of site-specific data that typically does not have latitude and longitude information included. I am generally given an address, city, state and zip for the data location.  Although Tableau will automatically map this data  at the state, city, and zip levels using generated latitude and longitude, many times I need to be more precise in making maps because I have more than one sample per zip code, for example.

A Simple Method For Adding Lat/Long to Your Data

There is a simple and cost-free way to quickly add lat/long to your database. This blog post describes one method that I use. There are probably other methods available, but this method has worked for me many times over the past few years and doesn’t require much technical expertise to complete the task successfully.

Step 1

You have a database that contains an address, city, state and zip as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1 – An example of a database without lat/long.

Your goal is to get the latitude and longitude added to the database as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2 – Your goal is to get Lat/Long added to the database.

Step 2

Copy the addresses and place them in a web page that does batch geocoding as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3 – Perform batch geocoding on your data.

The highlighted block shown in Figure 3 contains the lat/longs that you will paste back into your database.

Step 3

Read the data into Tableau to be able to map your locations down to the site-specific level, (i.e. at a specific lat/long) as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4 – Sites displayed in Tableau at the lat/long locations retuned from the batch geocoding process.

Step 4

If you want more details about this method, watch the video below. I go into quite a bit of detail on how this method is completed.