Today is the second day of our dashboard week.
Yesterday Andy mentioned our focus should be on analysing data. Cool. I like it!

Datasource: https://cancercontrol.cancer.gov/brp/tcrb/tus-cps/questionnaires-data

At 9 a.m., I got the link...and I didn't know where to start.

At first, I decided to download each DAT file for each year.
Found summarised DAT file. Well, don't need to union them.

What next?

Tried to put it straight to Tableau. Didn't work.
Tried to put it straight to Alteryx. Didn't work.
Put it to Excel. Output is messy and complicated.
Googled how to change data type format from DAT to CSV. Same Excel...

Okay, let's start from the beginning.

When to the site. Started to read everything. Found a few PDF files.
Downloaded.

Bad news: PDF is enormous!

Good news: Tableau can work with PDF.

First, download the whole document to see how Tableau shows the data.
I could handle the tables only on 1 page, but more became a problem.
Okay, at least I got something. Good start.
Years as a range like '2000-2001'. Alright, can work with that.

Got deep into the PDF file.
It was hard to decide what I needed, so I put some tables just to get something.
Find out how to merge tables in Tableau. It changes everything! Now I can work with tables of more than 1 page.
Did some sketches, decided what I what to add to the dashboard.

Got some insights from the data. In the ens decided to play with colours. Created color palette: https://colors.muz.li/

Tableau public: https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/viktoriia.slaikovskaia/viz/Smoking_16408741092170/DashboardSmoking?publish=yes

I really liked to play with this data.