So for day 4 of dashboard week we were tasked with building a dashboard with data taken from surveys done by the science quarterly review on American candy. Simple right? Wrong we were stipulated with only being able to do our data prep and dashboard building on prep and desktop in browser. Which is a nightmare! I hope I never have to do that again.
The prep was the hardest part of today as the data was extremely messy plus trying to output the data from the prep flow was infuriating!
Before going into the prep my plan was to have 2 tables:
- one table for the 2014 & 2015 data
- one table for the 2016 & 2017 data
- if necessary I would be able to use a relationship to connect both of those tables
Problems I faced when cleaning the data:
- I realized late into my prep work that i had aggregated my data incorrectly which required me to start trouble shooting as to why - the solution was to create an id for each row then count the number of rows. this ate up a lot of time
- the next issue I faced was naming all the columns correctly so the union worked once i did this i was able to start exporting this is where the biggest headache kicked in
- problem #3 was exporting the flow out of prep, for some reason this errored at every attempt. After panicking at this point due to the time running out and some much needed help from erica we managed to export out the flow for the 2016 and 17 table.
- problem #4 was I only realized once into tableau desktop on the server that relationships/ other joins wont be possible. this required me to go back to the flow and union everything there, as well as trouble shoot why the output continued to error.
After all the time spent on the data prep side of things I only had approx. 30mins left for my dashboard. This didn't allow me to produce my best work (as you can see below) but at least I came away from this day knowing I never want to prep or build a dashboard on server ever again!
