This is the last week of my training, which also means here comes dashboard week. I will be writing a blog everyday detailing what I did throughout the day. Hope you would enjoy my journey (including my mental roller coaster)!
Today's data set is about UK Street Crimes between March 2022 and March 2023, and the task is to create an Alteryx analytic app which allow users to filter out specific data points, which then the data will be presented in a KPI dashboard. More details of the task can be found in Robbin's post (https://www.thedataschool.co.uk/robbin-vernooij/dashboard-week-day-1-uk-street-crimes/).
I spend the entire morning creating the app. In hindsight, I should have planned my day before diving into making the app. The reason I did not plan much ahead is because I do not have much experience in creating app in Alteryx, which means I have little to no idea how much time it is going to take for me to create the app. And in the morning, I did spend a fair amount of time googling every other step.
This is my final workflow. Even though the logic of the workflow is correct, it has a practical issue. It is because I cross-tabbed a lookup table to use in the list box tool. Cross tab is known to have trouble handling non-letter character, so what end up happening was that all the spaces in the lookup table were replaced by underscore, e.g. "Criminal damage and arson" turning into "Criminal_damage_and_arson", which did not match the main data set. Therefore, some of the settings in the app would return zero output as there was no matches. It could be fixed with dynamic rename but I didn't have the time to complete it.
I decided to output as a google sheet from the beginning because I wanted to upload my dashboard to Tableau Public, with the functionality of being able to be refreshed by the app. If you are interested about how to use the tool, I wrote another blog talking about it, which you can find it here: https://www.thedataschool.co.uk/karina-chan/google-sheet-in-alteryx/.
I finished making my app at around 1pm. With around two hours left before presentation, I decided to keep it simple with my dashboard. I draw a rough sketch on my note pad then I started building immediately.
I know we are used to seeing beautiful sketches, but I want to say it really doesn't have to be fancy. The whole point of a sketch is only to help you to organise before building.
Overall I am happy with my works. My biggest takeaway is to not being fixated on any step. I only have a limited amount of time to finish a task. If something could not be fixed, note it down and then find a work around to continue the task.