Dashboard Week Day 1 - Cheese.com

Welcome to the first blog of the series for Dashboard Week. This week we are tasked each day to produce a dashboard and blog as well as other deliverables such as a documented data prep workflow and wireframes. Today’s task was vague as we were given cheese.com and the rest was up to us.

Cheese.com

First steps I took involved looking through cheese.com to try to identify any aspects that I could create a valuable data set with. I then decided to compare types of cheeses by their origin, milk, aroma, and texture.


Wireframing

From there, I started sketching what my dashboard could look like. I knew I would be comparing dimensions as my data set had no measures, so I chose to keep it simple by creating nested pie charts.

My first idea was to have a pie chart for each cheese with the intention to allow the user to interchange the view/grouping of the pies depending on origin country or milk used.

The blue and red squares represent the containers I planned to use for each part of the dashboard.


Web Scraping

I then navigate to Alteryx to web scrape the data I needed from cheese.com. I started off downloading from just https://www.cheese.com and then using RegEx pulled a list of 20 different cheeses. Once I had that list, I scraped from each individual cheese’s profile and collected info on their origin, milk, aroma, and texture.

After further cleaning up the data set in Alteryx, I then exported the file as a Tableau Hyper Data Extract to load that data set into Tableau.

Dashboard

Finally, once I imported my data from Alteryx, I started creating my pie charts. At first, I wasn't too happy with how the dashboard was going because it didn't feel like I was building a strong analysis. It just felt like I was creating a bunch of pointless pie charts. Due to time, I decided to continue with the route I was going, however, instead of a pie chart for each cheese, I created a pie chart for each country and milk type.

From there, I was finding certain countries and milk types had more cheeses, and therefore seemed to have more diversity when it comes to aroma and texture. Once I felt okay-ish about the story I planned to present I made the final touches to my dashboard, published to Tableau Public, and started writing this blog.


Next steps: start prepping for the presentation! Ahh!

Author:
Erin Potter
Powered by The Information Lab
1st Floor, 25 Watling Street, London, EC4M 9BR
Subscribe
to our Newsletter
Get the lastest news about The Data School and application tips
Subscribe now
© 2025 The Information Lab