Creating Isochrones Using Alteryx & Tableau (Part 2)

In Part 1 we showed how to create isochrone shapefiles in Alteryx, using some of the TravelTime macros. In this post we will walk through how to visualise these isochrones in Tableau. For this you will need access to a TravelTime API key.

The first step is to convert the shapefile into a format that Tableau can connect to. The shapefile created in Alteryx is actually four separate files, as you can see here:

To allow Tableau to connect to these, we simply put them into a new folder, and compress (zip) it:

Now we can open Tableau and connect to a Spatial file:

Select the zipped folder containing the shapefile and open it. Tableau will automatically load the isochrones into a table, with one line per isochrone.

Now that the data is loaded into Tableau, the next step is to create new worksheet.

Drag the Geometry measure into the marks card. A COLLECT calculation will be run automatically, and the result will look something like this:

We now have our isochrones displayed on the map, but we’d like to be able to distinguish more easily between the 15 and 30 minute shapes. To do this we need to format the Query_Isoc column (Tip - if you’ve renamed your fields at any point, this is the field containing the travel times in seconds – in this case 900s and 1800s).

Firstly we create a calculated field to convert the number into minutes (divide by 60):

Next we convert this new ‘Minutes travel’ measure into a Dimension and then drag the new dimension into Colour on the marks card.

We can now easily distinguish between the two 15 minute isochrones and the 30 minute ones:

Creating isochrones is just one of the functionalities of the TravelTime macros for Alteryx. They can also be used for calculating large journey time matrices, A to B routing, geocoding, and more.