Tableau geocoding woes

Written by Baxter Shandobil

For my final project, I am working with The Northwest Earth Institute, an environmental non-profit here in Portland.  Each year they host an “Ecochallenge” that encourages people to choose one simple action to reduce their impact on the environment, and stick with it for the duration of the challenge.  The 2016 edition had over 8500 participants from around the world.  I was tasked with creating a map to demonstrate the breadth of the worldwide participation, and was given a CSV with the name and location of each participant.  Unfortunately, these locations were not geocoded.  For that reason, in addition to the fact that they wanted an easily reproducible map, I decided to use Tableau to make my web map.

Tableau has a feature that will automatically geocode address for you.  The software indicates that it has recognized city, state, and country fields as locations by putting a little globe icon next them as seen below.  Just drag and drop into the box that says “Marks.” 

​Simple right?  Or so I thought…  But here is what happened when I dragged City and Country into my worksheet:

569 Unknown Locations??? Okay, so let’s try adding the states in to see if that helps:

In addition to their more unrecognized locations, adding the “States” field confused Tableau further and all the International points disappeared from the map.

I attempted to resolve this a few ways:

• I tried putting the U.S. cities and International cities in separate CSVs and adding them separately. No luck.
  
• I tried to let Tableau work its geocoding voodoo magic and export the results back out to a CSV so that I could manually fill in the blanks.  No luck.  When you export the CSV back out it doesn’t include that coordinates.

After much frustration, I realized that for the amount of time I had spent troubleshooting, I could have just done the entire thing myself manually.  So that is exactly what I did.  I have to say, mindless repetitive tasks get a bad rap sometimes!  It gave me a chance to catch up on some podcasts while I worked. 
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After all that, I realized that it actually is possible to export the coordinates back out to a CSV, I just did not dig deep enough on how to do it.  I had spent so much time diagnosing the issue that I just wanted to power through and get it done.
 
For future reference here is how to do it: