DS8 Week 2 in Review

by Nora-Ann Weststrate

Last week in The Data School we kicked the week off with Tableau, Tableau and more Tableau. This ranged from basic training in what does the different coloured pills mean to drawing the difference between discreet and continuous and how Tableau interprets each of the measures. Best of all was the great amount of training that we received from Andy. Here are some of the examples. We totalled a full 93 sheets and that’s not even all that we did!

This included table calculations, a #MakeoverMonday, a serious #WorkoutWednesday (which was a whole lot of fun) and finally we ended off the week with the makeover of our application viz and its presentation.

Application viz makeover project: get some more data in there!

Having learned some Alteryx tricks in our first week, the idea was to supplement our original application viz with additional data and to build a better or more meaningful viz. Personally, I didn’t want to touch my original application viz data as there was a whole lot of applied Excel-chaos to work with. I started from scratch. My aim was not so much to supplement my data. It was more to use the full set of data that was available.

Illustrating how amazing Alteryx is

To illustrate what Alteryx can do (with one week of basic training), I include a screen shot of the sample data. Here I want to thank whoever made the effort of putting the Excel spread sheets together… There was an Excel file for every year dating up to July 2017 with the number of registered foreign nationals for each county and borough in the UK (Illustration 1): numbers, confidence intervals, even spaces before the county names to illustrate the hierarchy. Each nationality was listed from A-K in one sheet while L-Z was listed in a second sheet. It must have taken ages to put it together!

Illustration 1. Sample of the original data.

In my original application, having all the data but not being able to manipulate it for my application viz was just frustrating. I ended up using the totals and a whole lot of copying, pasting and transposing to put my data together (which took 3 days). The result was somewhat lacking in dimension (for lack of a better word). However, having had some training in Alteryx during our first week of DS8, it was possible to put a whole new data set together within a single afternoon (Illustration 2). It was truly fascinating!

Illustration 2. Sample of data after Alteryx happened.

Building my new viz in Tableau

Having a beautiful data set and knowing exactly what questions I wanted to address in the makeover of my viz, things just came naturally… The end results? You can use the interactive viz to see when, where and how many immigrants of any nationality lives in any borough of London and how the numbers have changed between 2004 and 2016.

You can find my interactive viz here.

Looking forward to all the new things we will be learning over the next couple of months!