Today I completed my first Friday project. I was given 4 data files, 3 of which contained data about hotel reservations, and 1 which contained data about the transactions of hotel guests.
Firstly, I unioned the 3 hotel tables so that it was quicker to clean 1 table rather than 3 (and then subsequently union).
Secondly, I created a date field, from check in day, check in month (make sure you convert this to a number first), and check in year using the MAKEDATE function e.g.
MAKEDATE ([check-in year], [check-in month], [check-in day])
Next, I cleaned the hotel file using the split method to separate number of adults and children, and by using IF statements in order to convert tables to string data which is easier to understand e.g.
IF ‘Room Type’ = 1 THEN ‘Single’
ELSEIF ‘Room Type’ = 2 THEN ‘Double’
END
Then I moved onto the fourth file about transactions. I split the transaction ID into a reservation ID and transaction number. Then joined the file based on the common field of reservation ID. I completed a left join, as there may have been some guests who had a reservation but did not purchase anything.
Finally I cleaned the file (I would have done these steps before joining just so you are joining two clean files but it doesn’t make a difference to the output) by swapping numeric department files to strings using IF statements like above. And I had to go back to my adult and child columns and convert them to numeric data types.
Overall, I really enjoyed this challenge and was pleased that I was able to sketch out my output before starting on tableau prep, ensuring I knew how many columns and rows to expect. The most useful thing I did was immediately asked questions e.g. I asked on CONVO how to combine the date fields into 1.
My main piece of feedback was that I spoke too quickly, especially if there are listeners whose English is not their first language, it was potentially difficult to follow on. In addition, I personally think I could have looked directly into the camera and out to the audience more.