Day two of dashboard week and we've been thrown a curveball. We're making dashboards in Alteryx.

The data we've been told to use concerns hailstorms in the USA and comes from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration - NOAA. Each row of the data contains stats for a hailstorm including date, time, state, start and end location and number of injuries resulting.

Based on the fields available I chose to focus my analysis on injuries sustained from hailstorms and decided on four charts to produce to visualise this analysis.

Before Branching Out

Before splitting off the workflow into the four chart branches I renamed all of the fields based on the documentation provided with the data. I also constructed spatial fields to determine the distance each storm travelled and added a marker to each row to indicate whether the storm caused injuries or not.

The First Chart

The top branch of the workflow creates a map chart indicating the number of injuries from hailstorms that each state has had. I joined the output of a summarise tool with shape files for each state (shape files found on the NOAA website).

This gave me a table with each state, the number of injuries from that state and a spatial object for each state. Feeding this information into the report map tool generated the chart I was wanting.

The Second Chart

The next chart simply required one summarise tool. By grouping number of injuries by year, I got a table detailing the number of injuries from hailstorms received for each year in the data. Adding this table into a chart tool allowed the creation of the following chart.

The Final Two Charts

The final two charts also only needed one summarise tool for the preparation. The first was grouped on the 'caused injuries?' marker and was aggregated by averaging the size of the hailstones. Using a chart tool on this table gave the following chart.

The other chart was also grouped on the 'caused injuries?' marker but was aggregated by averaging the distance the storms travelled - the chart looks very similar.

Pulling Together

Using apend and layout tools I managed to correctly size the charts so that they would fit on one page. I firstly connected charts one and two and charts three and four together vertically in two different layout tools. After apending the two layout tools I then used a further layout tool to connect them horizontally and added a header.

The entire workflow can be seen in the following picture.

The dashboard that is output from this workflow can be seen below.

Ultimately, I was not a massive fan of the process involved in creating a dashboards in alteryx but thought the challenge today was a great way to learn how to do it.