Rent in San Francisco and the end of Dashboard Challenge

by Damiana Spadafora

So we made it to the end of the Dashboard Challenge week, with enough brain cells left to decide to go to the pub and celebrate. It wasn’t easy but it was incredibly fun. Small datasets, large datasets, and incredibly short amounts of time to complete each dashboard made me realise how much is really possible with Tableau. Don’t believe me? The dashboard you are about to see was complete in 40 minutes. You know how a few posts ago I said I would try and build a dashboard in one hour? Turns out one needs less time than that.

Dashboard 1

One more time, it is far from perfect, but it was done with data I was not familiar with and at 2.20 pm when I was expected to present it at 3 pm. And it is presentable, it is a viable first draft that you can actually show to a client. Tableau is the perfect example of agile development: create something quickly, show it to the customer, gather feedback, improve upon your dashboard, start again. It’s brilliant!

Now, the fact that it’s Sunday does not mean I will leave you without a tip. Here are the two takeaways from this dashboard:

  • You can use sheets as filters on a dashboards but actions give you more flexibility. The problem with using a sheet as a filter is that it will affect all the other sheets on the dashboard (as long as they use the same dataset). In my case I wanted the top right sheet to remain the same regardless of which zip code was selected and change only the bottom right sheet. In order to do see I created an action that had as a source my Map sheet, as a target the bottom right sheet and was triggered by a select action.
  • How to limit the amount of items that can be selected. What happens with my bottom right sheet if no state is selected? One would expect a mess of spark lines, but I had a little trick up my sleeve. I created a calculated field which I then put in the filter that tells Tableau to show only up to a certain amount of selected items and not show anything if that threshold is passed. Here is the calculation:
    • total(countd([ZIP Code]))<=1
    • Replace ZIP Code with the field that users will select
    • Set the value of this filter to exclude False

That is all for this week. Have a great Bank Holiday! (Or just a good Monday)