How to geocode thousands of addresses and make a Tableau custom polygon + point map, with a little help from FME

I recently had an opportunity to test the new spatial data connector in Tableau. It is a highly anticipated addition to the long list of connectors that allows you to work with ESRI Shapefiles, KML, MapInfo, and GeoJSON files directly in Tableau. The connector can interpret polygon and point entities (no lines as of yet) and is a big step towards making creation of maps in Tableau a much better experience. This long post is split into 2 parts, the first one describing preparation of data (which I did in FME) and the second part is about handling multiple shapefiles in Tableau to make the map work just the way we want it to.

PART 1 – data preparation

A little background about the project. I want to plot about 30,000 nonprofit organizations on a map of Washington State and classify them by the groups they belong to…

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