Onto day 4 of #TipWeek here at the Data School. Yesterday I showed you how to create route maps to analyse things such as personal exercise data and today’s tip will show you a neat little tweak that can be used to highlight the start and end position of your route map.

To start, we need to create a calculated field to identify the start and end points; also known as the first and last points. Click on the Jeremy next to Dimensions and select ‘Create Calculated Field’ and use the following IF formula to help Tableau identify the first and last points. This creates a default table calculation.

To add additional views to our chart we will need to create a dual axis. Drag Lat to rows again and right click on the new pill and select dual axis. You will now have 3 marks cards; All, AVG(Lat) and AVG(Lat) (2); change the AVG(Lat) (2) marks card type to Circle. Once this is done, drag the calculated field onto the colour shelf of the AVG(Lat) (2) marks card.

Only ‘Start’ will show and every point from the dataset will be shown initially but we can fix that…

Click on the Jeremy on the calculated field in the AVG(Lat) (2) marks card and change the table calculation to compute using Path; in other words, tell Tableau to calculate the first and last points of Path and show them.

We now get 3 results in our colour shelf; End (last), Null and Start (first) – result! We can now simply right click the null and hide it and we will then have a route map with circles identifying the start and end points!

Be sure to follow fellow #DS2-er Ben‘s tip and remove the tooltips from the AVG(Lat) (2) marks card as the data won’t show anything useful to the user.

I hope this helps build on the route map from yesterday, feel free to get contact with any comments or feedback!