Day 4 of Dashboard Week: An End in Sight

by Jack Turner

For the first time this week, we’ve been able to get straight into Tableau with hardly any prep in Alteryx. This was pretty encouraging because if nothing else we’d have dashboards by 5pm.

The data today was on child obesity in the UK, but because the data was originally came from a project for the Guy’s and St. Thomas’ Charity, we were asked to focus on the London Boroughs of Southwark and Lambeth.

As things are never simple in Dashboard Week, we were also given extra requirements. Our dashboards had to include animations, a Mapbox map and set or parameter actions.

It’s been a common theme this week, but I first started with the spatial data. We had LSOAs, MSOAs and London Boroughs. As I wasn’t sure which spatial level I would use, I joined shapefiles of all three to the data.

I then got started on the Mapbox base map. Since I wanted to block out anything that wasn’t London, I had pull a custom shapefile into Mapbox. This was a mask, which is essentially a block shape with the a hole of the shape that you want to appear. The mask acts as a frame to everything in the hole shows through and everything else is hidden.

To create a mask in Alteryx you need two shapefiles. One of the shape that will be the aperture and a larger geographical shape which will act as the blocked out background. In my case, I used a polygon of Greater London and one of the UK. You can then use the Spatial Process tool to create an Inverse Intersection Object.

After creating this intersection shapefile, I could then make my Mapbox map of London

Although the main dataset that we had, didn’t have obesity data over time, it did have figures for different age groups. I though I could present this as a time series as it shows how rates of obesity change as children get older.

I did this by making a series of maps and slope charts split by Southwark and Lambeth.

My finished dashboard: https://public.tableau.com/views/ObesityinSouthLondon/Dashboard1?:display_count=y&publish=yes&:origin=viz_share_link

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Jack Turner

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