In today’s dashboard week we asked to create an analytical dashboard that was looking at tobacco usage in the USA.

My approach to today from what I had learned from yesterday was to get hands on with the data as soon as possible. The challenge that I found for today was that the data was downloaded in an unfamiliar format and a lot of prep was required. This meant I had to manage my time very well and be selective on the fields I wanted to analyse. If I had had more time I would have liked to include some more fields in my final dashboard so that I could gain some more insights from the data. By looking at the data dictionary I knew which fields I wanted to parse out and what questions I wanted to answer with my dashboard. I decided to focus on gender and education and look at the distribution of these fields across different factors.

I used a lot of regex to parse the data through and once had completed the data prep I went straight in to tableau and made different charts trying to answer my question. I then made a plan of how I wanted my dashboard to look and put my charts in to the template I had made. Unfortunately the filtering didn’t work as I would have liked so I had to work around this and change my original plan slightly. I would have liked to format my dashboard a little more but was unable to due to the time limit.

From today I have learned how to parse tricky data and how to plan in advance so that I had less data to handle in tableau and have a plan of action from the start. Going in to tomorrow I hope to further improve my time management so that I am able to have some more time formatting my dashboard.