Dashboard Week: Day 3

by Rahul Lalwani

Today, we were tasked with analysing the poll in which people voted for their favourite Star Wars film (Further information can be found here). Aside from general data such as age and gender, the poll also includes information such as political beliefs and education level, among other things (It is interesting that someone would include that in a survey). Further information can be found here.

Step 1 Excel

Because the survey data was in PDF format, the team found it extremely difficult to import the file into Alteryx or Tableau Prep. The only solution we could think of was to convert the PDF to an excel file using an online converter, then prep the majority of the data in Excel itself because the format of each table was different and the online converter could not parse all of the numbers. As a result, we had to replace the strange characters with numbers. The following is a partial screenshot of the table:

Step 2 Alteryx

After doing some preliminary work in Excel and combining the tables into a single sheet, it was time to import the dataset into Alteryx for further cleaning. This included the pivoting, text-to-columns, and multifield formula tools. To sum up, we needed to prepare the data so that it would be "Tableau friendly." The workflow is displayed in the following screenshot:

Step 3 Tableau

We were unable to analyse much of the data as we were running out of time. Nonetheless, we could just about create a simple dashboard displaying the statistics of various types of voters and the movie they preferred. The dashboard can be found here.

MAIN TAKEAWAY

Prepare to accept data in any format and use as many tools as possible to save time and progress.

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Rahul Lalwani

Thu 25 Nov 2021

Wed 24 Nov 2021