Hello all! I am Amalia, and I have recently joined the Data School as part of the DS22 Cohort :) this is my first post and I will go through the project we did in the 4th week of pre-training.
Last week's project consisted of choosing one of our old vizzes and improving it using what we had learned in this first weeks of training.
Additionally, we had to find a relevant data source to add to the original in order to enrich the analysis using Alteryx or Prep for this first step.
I chose one of the first vizzes I published on my Tableau public profile as it has a lot of things to improve.
![](https://www.thedataschool.co.uk/content/images/2020/12/image-56.png)
In terms of what we learned in DataViz 101
- No title: At first glance is not easy to identify what the viz is about. It’s important to have an engaging title and subtitle.
- Consistent formatting. I used different colours for the text, different font sizes and too much colour.
- Remove gridlines and borders.
- There is a label for each bar in the bar chart, it would be better to have just one for the maximum and another for the minimum.
- The first part is comparing regions, and then as I focus on Spain, I excluded all the countries that are not in Europe, but I didn’t specify that.
- It is difficult to follow the analysis and there are no insights.
Adding a new dataset.
The original dataset contained; regions, countries, life satisfaction and GDP/capita.
I decided I wanted to find a simple new dataset, so I looked for a dataset containing life expectancy and European countries.
Using Tableau Prep I cleaned the data, changed some data types, excluded all the regions except Europe in the original dataset, and joined both tables using “Country”.
![](https://www.thedataschool.co.uk/content/images/2020/12/image-58.png)
The granularity was not the same because the year field didn’t appear in the new dataset, so life expectancy is duplicated for all years.
This is what I achieved in 2 hours:
![](https://www.thedataschool.co.uk/content/images/2020/12/image-63.png)
I didn’t have time to do everything that I wanted to, so I have worked on it in order to finish.
I changed a bit more the formatting, edited the tooltips, modified grammar, highlighted Norway, and instead of using the size mark for life expectancy, I used a diverging color, to show the difference in life expectancy among countries. This is the final result:
![](https://www.thedataschool.co.uk/content/images/2020/12/image-62.png)
I really enjoyed this project and found it very useful as it was opportunity to use the knowledge acquired in the first weeks of pre-training.