Hello,
I am a new user to Tableau, so please pardon my ignorance of some basic processes/terminologies.
I am working to create a Tableau polygon file from a ArcGIS shapefile. Previously, I've followed directions in the post below to generate functional polygon files in Tableau; however, this time, I think my original shapefile may be too complex to follow these same directions.
http://kb.tableausoftware.com/articles/knowledgebase/tableau-polygons-arcgis-shapefiles
My original shapefile has 7,251 polygons. When I convert these polygons to a point file, I end up with a dbf file that has >4 million records where each record is an xy coordinate for a vertex and another field lists the drawing order. Given excel's ~1,000,000 record limit, I can't convert my dbf to an excel file and connect to this excel file in Tableau.
My solution may be as simple as doing some kind of data extract based on the 4 million record .dbf file associated with my shapefile, but I'm not sure how this would work. Does anyone have any suggestions/instructions for how to make this work?
Thank you in advance,
Casey Lott
American Bird Conservancy
(208) 629-8705
There are several tools to convert shape files to a polygon file for Tableau. Usually I use Richard Leeke's shape2tab. It's easier than the Tableau recommended approach, more flexible than the R tool (that is otherwise very nice,and if you're an R person, worth checking out), and cheaper than Alteryx.
Note that Richard has another utility tabgeohack, which converts a shapefile to the same format used internally by Tableau, which has some advantages you can read about (and a big disadvantage in that it's unsupported).
On shape2tab, you can use the --simplify to reduce the resolution of the shapes in Tableau. On a regional or country-wide scale, you often won't notice the difference in simplified polygons and it'll provide a significant speedup in Tableau.
Jim
