Mapbox is a site that provides custom map templates, allows you to customise their templates, and integrate these templates with other programs. In this blog post, I’ll be running through step-by-step how to use Mapbox Studio and bring in your custom maps into Tableau.
Mapbox Studio
The first step to creating custom maps is to sign up to Mapbox Studio. After this, you’ll be presented with the home page.
This is where you can access all of your previously designed styles. To start a new design, click on the ‘New Style’ button.
We can see multiple templates available as a base, or the option of starting with a blank canvas. After choosing a template (we’ll choose the Monochrome design for this tutorial), choose a variation and click ‘Customise’.
This will bring you to the editor screen.
From here, play around with colours, details, and typography to create your ideal design. I won’t be running through the nitty-gritty as the process is fairly intuitive — play around with the options and once you’re settled, click ‘Publish’.
‘Publish as new’ to create a new style, or simply click ‘Publish’ to overwrite the existing design. Next, click on ‘Share’.
At this point the goal is to grab a URL to direct Tableau to. From the ‘Share’ menu click on ‘Third Party’. Change WMTS to Tableau and then click on the blue ‘Copy’ button next to the Integration URL to copy the link.
Tableau
Open your file in Tableau that has the geographic data you plan to map. Under Maps > Background Maps > Add Mapbox Map… , paste the link you copied into the URL text field. Name the style whatever you’d like in the ‘Style’ field, and then click OK.
Drag your geographical data into the view and you will now see your data is plotted on your new map!
Adding Mapbox maps to Tableau is simple, allowing you to further customise the design of your visualisation.
If you want to explore my previous blog posts, click here to see how to map basketball shots in Tableau, use spatial tools in Alteryx, and more!