How to customize missing regions

When you make a map that colors regions by category or value, you may want to include regions that don't have a specific category or value attached to them. 

These regions might still need to be visible to provide context or to highlight that they have missing data. In this help doc, you'll learn how you can customize the appearance and behavior of these regions. 

In this article

What counts as a missing region?

Regions are categorized as "missing" when the visualization has a boundary for it in the Regions geometry tab, but your data does not contain any information for them.


Here is what the Data tab of such visualizations looks like:

In our Regions tab, we have data for only 20 European countries. However, the Regions geometry tab contains boundaries for the whole continent. That makes some regions (most of Eastern Europe and Iceland) missing.

By default, the template will "ignore" these regions – this means that you wouldn't be able to highlight them, hover over them or add popups. However, you can change this – read how here.

How to customize the appearance of missing regions

    1
    Go to Regions layer > Missing values. In this section, you can customize how missing regions appear on your map.

    2
    Choose from one of the four Action options:

    • Use fill color means that missing regions will use the default fill color specified at the top of the Regions layer settings:

    • For Use a pattern you can customize the square opacity, size and colors:

    • Hide region will hide the whole region completely and missing regions will not have popups.
    • Make region transparent still shows the outlines of missing regions, and missing regions will still have popups.

    See below for how each of these Action options looks and behaves:

TIP: Sometimes, you may want to customize the popups or panels of the missing regions only. Use custom popups and conditional statements to do this.

How to add additional information for regions with no data

Although these regions do not contain actual data, they still need to appear in your Regions tab in order to be customized. We'll do this by using the upload and merge function.

1
Head to your Regions geometry tab and download the sheet as GeoJSON.

2
Head over to your Regions tab and select Upload & merge on the right-hand side.

3
Upload and merge the GeoJSON file you downloaded from the Regions geometry tab with your dataset. To merge, you should use the "anchor" column you have used for a Geo region key. In our case, this column is called Country under Regions, and WB_Name under Regions geometry.

4
Before you merge, make sure that you have selected the following ticks:

This is because these rows will contain information about the missing regions that we want to combine with the regions with data.

TIP: We also recommend deselecting the automated column selection feature, to avoid new columns being assigned to your column bindings.

5
Once you have merged your file, you should be able to see new rows added – these will contain the geometrical boundaries, but wouldn't have information in all columns. These will most likely be added at the bottom.

6
To classify the missing regions as containing data, simply copy and paste the relevant information of the merged files to the correct column that's used for Geo region key in the Regions tab.

7
Now the information in the columns used for Geo region key in both the Regions and Regions geometry tabs should contain the very same information. You can check whether this works by going to the Preview tab and hovering over a previously missing region. If you can hover over it, then the merge has worked.

8
Now you can add extra information in the popups for all regions, regardless of whether they have a value to be colored by.

TIP: Want to display different popup and panel information for regions, depending on whether they have data or not? You should use conditional formatting – learn how to do this here.

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