Introduction

Three weeks ago I published how to install and use seven additional background maps in Tableau. One of the features I mentioned was that you had to pick the checkbox in the Map Options menu to get the maps to appear. Now that requirement has been eliminated due to an astute reader of this blog. This short article describes an easy fix to make this functionality work.

Details

Today (4/22/15) Omar wrote a couple of comments (see Figure 1 and 2 at the end of this article) to the original article that provided the fix needed to make the maps appear automatically once they are selected from the map menu. This allows you to quickly toggle between background map types without having to hit those pesky check-boxes.

Omar’s first contribution is this:

In line 16 of the *.tms files, the value attribute needs to be set to “true” rather than the name of the map type.  For the National Geographic Map, the correct syntax is:

<format attr=”enabled” id=”Nat Geo World Map” value=”true”/>

Omar’s second contribution is this:

In the map World_LTGrey, there was a cut and paste error in the XML file. The corrected line is shown below:

<format attr=”enabled” id=”World Light Grey Base” value=”true” />

Updated Excel File

The excel that was originally provided with article has been updated. You can download the file by clicking this link: Tableau_Mapsources, if needed, or you can edit your seven *.tms files in about a minute.

Figure 1 – Omar’s first comment.

Figure 2 – Omar’s second comment.