In an attempt to complete this homework, I ended up trying to manipulate Tableau into seeing the values in the “Agency 1” column as geographic entities, and fill in the missing information with the geographic measures in the zip code file.
I approached the data this way because when I was in class, I was able to match a portion of the cities/counties in Agency 1 on a map of Arkansas. Tableau placed nearly a quarter of them in the correct location. These cities were mainly the most prominent ones like Little Rock, Fayetteville, Bentonville, Rogers, etc. But, it sent me a message saying that it didn’t know where to place the other ones. I uploaded the zip code file hoping that the information in there could help Tableau place the remaining localities.
I linked the 2014 data with the zip code data by “Agency 1” and “primary_city.” I tinkered with these settings a while until I realized that maybe I should use the latitude and longitude provided by the zip code data instead of the ones generated by Tableau because Tableau didn’t seem to have a geographical point of reference for this data, but the zip code data did. Well, the rest of the localities came up, but they were all over the map, branching out beyond the Arkansas borders.
After several unsuccessful attempts to ground the localities in Arkansas, I decided to try the VLOOKUP function in Excel to see if I could find any luck there. I was quickly reminded of just how much I hate VLOOKUP when I repeated found only #VALUESs and #N/As.
I’d say this was an unsuccessful attempt on my part, but I think I did learn a lot about the mapping function while I tinkered.
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