We’re setting the students some hard challenges so it’s only fair that some weeks the coaches join in. Therefore tonight I sat down to copy the students and build visualisation based on the theme of Education, using data sourced only from the internet and with Alteryx as my data preparation tool.

Data Sourcing

I chose to use the Times World University Rankings, I wanted to visualise these over three years and allow people to compare how institutions have fluctuated in the ranks over that period. There is a challenge however as the data is in webpages and is hard to extract, neither Import IO nor Kimino were able to cope with the pages.

Alteryx to the rescue

I noticed the HTML source had a JSON table containing the data I needed:

 It always helps to dig into the source of webpages and know a little bit of code – while I couldn’t understand the code I knew enough to tell this was a large JSON table packed with all the info I needed

So I copied this data source for each year into text files and then set about importing them into Alteryx. The finished workflow should be self explanatory from the picture and comments below, the workflow and data can be downloaded from here.

 Tableau

Click below to see a video showing the basics that went into my visualisation, it was a really simple one to build.

Click on the image below to see the finished visualisation:

Thanks for viewing!