Tableau Tip Tuesday: Using Alteryx, Mapbox & Tableau to Map Every Primary & Secondary Road in the US

Tableau 10.4 brings us support for linear geometry shapefiles. In this week's tip, I demonstrate how to create a map of all primary and secondary roads in the US by combining them in Alteryx and visualising them in Tableau. I also use a solid black US map with transparent oceans created in Mapbox for a better map experience.

Download the workbook I created to have a play yourself. Obviously this requires Tableau 10.4. Once Tableau Public is running 10.4, I'll upload it there as well.

In the video, you'll notice I used the Generalize tool in Alteryx. This took the file size from 500MB to 33MB, merely by aggregating up to 1 mile. Pretty sweet! Thanks to Chris Love for the tip!


Here's the how-to video. Enjoy!