DS25 Dashboard Week: Most Consumed Vegetables in the US

by Jesus Esquivel Roman

The Project

Today's topic is the Most Commonly Consumed Vegetables by Americans. The link provides a super simple overview and the task for today's project was to improve it. The data can be downloaded from the USDA.

Requirements

1. A sketch of the proposed dashboard

2. Data prep can only be done using Tableau Prep

3.  KPI style dashboard with filtering capabilities in Tableau

4. A blog post capturing the design, workflows, decisions, challenges, and final output.

Steps

1. Sketch

2. Identify datasource to use and useful sheet names (Loss-Adjusted Food Availability Vegetables table).

3. Wildcard union for all Excel sheets excluding summary sheets and Table of Contents.

4. Merge fields with slightly different names, rename field names and remove not useful fields or nulls.

5. Output as hyperfile to be used in Tableau Desktop

6. Produce a dashboard

Dashboard decisions:

  • Summary KPI with Most common vegetable, Consumption for most common vegetables, Consumption for all (or selected) vegetable(s) and Most common consumption type (e.g. fresh, canned, etc.).
  • Filtered charts
  • Filters for year, consumption method, vegetable, unit measure (g/day, oz/day and lbs/year), and top value selection

Challenges

  • Numerous Excel tables and sheets
  • Vegetables that are not necessarily vegetables (e.g. Legumes, Potato chips)
  • 3 types of units (g/day, oz/day and lbs/year) took some time to build 6 charts for the top 2 charts in the dashboard