Today actually started pretty good! The challenge Andy set seemed pretty straightforward; download all of the csv files and mush them together and make a dashboard. The first 2 parts went pretty well.

Downloading the csv files

I started by grabbing a list of all the countries that were available to download, manually downloading one of the files from the website and using removing duplicates in Excel gave me the full list, then I went through each page and grabbed the url required to get the data;

Using the append tool I was able to create every country with every url needed to call the data. I supplemented this with a formula tool to concatenate the full URL, lastly I ploughed all of this into the download tool;

The configuration of the download tool took a bit of trial and error, i first tried downloading the data and trying to parse it but after a few attempts I gave up on this and opted to download all of the files to my local drive where I could processes them in the correct format. I updated my formula tool to generate a location on my hard drive for the files to be stored and approximately 15 seconds later I had downloaded 800 csv files!

The last thing to do was to import the data and join it all together for Tableau, to make life easier I created a separate workflow;

And that was 30 minutes work. Feeling pretty confident I relaxed and just went about the dashboard with no real gusto….big mistake!

The website has lots of pre-built visualisations and so I thought I’d see if I could recreate one in Tableau, so I opted for this one;

Not a great visualisation but it could be fun to build…it was not!

I did pretty well with getting the bars to look similar (minus the colour scaling) and I got the ranking to work with out any issue but the problem came with trying to grab the value for the first year and the last year…in theory this sounds pretty straightforward but it wouldn’t work! I even had to call in the big guns (Andy) who swore at my laptop and walked off!

So here’s where I got to….I’m going to keep plugging away at it and see if I can solve this issue!

Maybe one day it’ll get finished!

Edit – 19:26

I’m getting closer