Wedding Map

If you don't know, I'm currently planning my wedding to a beautiful woman. She also works in the business intelligence arena so portions of our job responsibilities are similar.

One of my favorite things we do together takes place on some Saturday mornings when we each grab a cup of coffee, sit at the dining room table, and work on pet projects. Mine typically involve Tableau Public, Fiverr, or our wedding hashtag #BrandiLovesTara.

We both have a desire to enter a contest put on by Visualizing, but that hasn't happened yet. There is so much we want to learn that we are constantly getting sidetracked (much like I am right now).

I wanted to talk about our wedding invitations. Maybe you have seen invitation with a little map plotting the different sites related to the wedding events (here is an example). With lots of out of town guests I think a map (in addition to directions) would be helpful. Google Maps provides a way to save locations to a saved map. You can even change the look of the pins and the background map. Unfortunately, with a grey map street names are not available and the original Google Map looks like this.

My next thought was of Tableau and the maps available. I know they look like what I want and that I would have more control over the washout, labels, shapes, sizes, etc. So I took my locations and put them into Excel. I used iTouchMap.com to put in the addresses and find latitude and longitude.

I then used the latitude and longitude from my file to plot the different sites and made slight modifications to the map (such as showing streets). A search on Google provided appropriate images, althought I changed their color using Microsoft Office Picture Manager. Back in Tableau, I set each location to be their respective image. Here's the map:

What do you think? Please comment below!