Our task for the fourth day of dashboard week was to visualise survey data about candy. We got Alteryx taken away from us – only Tableau Prep was allowed to use, and we were still not allowed to use Tableau Desktop. Instead, we had to build our dashboards in Tableau Online. This is how today went.

Getting the data

We were required to download four years’ data from The Science Quarterly Review and clean it in Tableau Prep. My plan was to clean one year’s worth of data first, see what I can create using it and then go back and clean the rest. Unfortunately, I ran out of time so ended up looking at 2017’s data only. I also decided to focus on American respondents only to make my life a little bit easier as the survey allowed free text input, which made everything very messy.

Building the dashboard

Today was the first day of this week when I managed to sketch what I wanted to build. However, no part of this plan really came to life. I was glad we got some form of Tableau back BUT I haven’t felt this frustrated in a really long time. Compared to Tableau Desktop, what you can do in web edit is extremely limited. The most upsetting/frustrating/annoying thing about web edit is the lack of formatting options. I ended up creating a diverging stacked bar chart (according to my initial plan) but the rest of my dashboard looks catastrophic and has zero interactivity. I really do hope that the last day of dashboard week will be much more fun.