In dashboards, drill down facility provides good user experience. Using drill down users can go down to the level of details.

In this article, i will show how to drill down from County to Zipcode level of Maps.

The objective here is to create 2 Maps, one for County and one for Zipcode. When user clicks on a specific county, he should get zipcodes related to the selected county.

1. Create a new sheet CountyMap and create a County level Map. For this exercise, i am using the same dataset and steps listed in How to create Maps in Tableau
2. Create a new sheet ZipMap and create zip code level map.
   1. To create zipcode level map, double click on the zipcode field on your datasource. Since it is a geographical data, Tableau will automatically create a Map using Longitude and Latitude
   2. Drag Sales to color and label shelf
   3. You will get a big busy map as there are lot of zipcodes. To get a clear picture, you can filter zipcodes by county. Drag County to Filters tab. Select All or a specific county. I will choose Franklin county

I will get zipcode Map for Franklin county.

How to drill down from County to Zipcode

1. Create New dashboard by navigating to Menu/Dashboard – New Dashboard on the tool bar. Dashboards can also be created similar to sheets from the bottom of the page.
2. Dashboard is a collection of sheets. You can drag and drop the sheets, you want to include in your dashboard

3. Double click on the sheets CountyMap and ZipMap to place them on the display screen. If you want to follow a certain layout format then you can choose Horizontal and Vertical from the options on the left. Your dashboard will look like the following

4. This Map looks very cumbersome and difficult to understand. There should be a way to filter these charts to make them more clear

5. Right click on the top right hand drop down icon on the County Map and check , use a filter. This will make County Map into a filter and clicking on any county will filter the Zipcode level Map.

6. Click on any County and observe that the zipcode level Map for that specific county will show up. If the size of the Maps are small then zoom in to see the correct size. I will click on Delware county on the left and will see the related zipcodes on the right

Sometimes, Zipcodes cross county boundaries i.e one zipcode may fall in two counties. In such cases, it may be useful to show County boundary or shape outline on the zipcode map.

In my next blog i will work on displaying county boundaries.

Please contact, if you need my data set or my twbx.