Dashboard week: Day 1.
So here we are, finally, it’s the DSAU10’s turn to take on the infamous dashboard week. It’s so unfortunate that this occurred on our first day at the office! Nevertheless, the show must go on. Today after a warm welcome we were gifted with our first dashboard challenge. This was to create a dashboard from the ACNC Register of Australian charities. This challenge doesn’t sound too difficult right? The truth is it probably isn’t going to be the worst one we face, however there was one slight difficultly with this dataset… We don’t have any measure values to work with!
Let me take you through the dataset:
Here we have a list of registered charities and the columns with the “Y” s are focus areas for the charity. So, for example “operates in NSW”, if that charity operates in NSW, then you will see a Y next to it. There are 48 of these focus areas! So, the question became how I can come up with something meaningful from this set. Well First of all this dataset was quite large, so I wanted to reduce it by focusing on one key area, particularly educational. I wanted to allow the user to filter through different “focus areas” (these included demographic information, interests, and additional drill downs on education areas) in relation to education.
So, what did I do?
I went straight into Alteryx, honestly most of my time was spent in Alteryx trying to find the best methods to prep my data for my dashboard. I had to create my own columns based on the category e.g. Gender, as the columns were spilt up like this:
So here is my workflow solution:
And from this I was able to get my data in the correct format to still be able to perform a count function in tableau, whilst also creating filter options.
Finally, from this I was able to create my first dashboard of this week:
Here the user can utilise the filters to find the charity that best meets their individual values and beliefs. From this the user can then select on a bar and that will open up a google search on the charity. This is so that the user can learn more as the data set, we received didn’t go into too much detail. If after the google search the user decides that they still don’t feel like the chosen charity is the best fit for them, they can go back and click through the bar charts to do more research.
It’s crazy to think that from that messy(ish) data set, with no real measures I was able to create a workflow and dashboard that cleaned and presented the data in a way that added value. That’s what this week is all about essentially. Finding the most efficient ways to combine your individual skills, your recently gained knowledge and workplace “pressure” to create the best possible result given the situation.
