9:05 data is up, we have to make 2 dashboards today, one in Power BI and one in tableau, feeling very traitorous already. The team is already badmouthing Power BI saying that it looks ugly, I’m going to try and go in with a fairly neutral mindset. The data requires very little cleaning and there isn’t very much of it either which is nice, the only issue is that the terms are very economics based so it’s hard for me to see the importance behind them, as of right now they appear to just be numbers in rows and columns.

10:05 the data is all cleaned up and ready to go into power BI, I’m going to start here because I don’t be able to make anything good in power BI, but it could potentially make a good tool to help me get my head around the data and perhaps figure out what I want to include in Tableau.

10:45 Haven’t really figured out how to use Power BI yet, but I do have a fairly good image in my head of what I want to do with the data in tableau, I want to have a dashboard looking at each sheet form the original data, there will hopefully be some buttons at the top of the page which can be used as filters to go in between the sheets and give a nice little KPI dashboard for each sheet. I may also follow Great Britain throughout to see how we’ve changed by these metrics over the years.

10:49 Power BI isn’t going well, sometimes I drag things onto shelves and all the marks are aggregated, other times when I drag fields onto the axis it just doesn’t show anything in the view, I have N O I D EA what I’m doing.

11:03 Power BI is now making a bit more sense, very drag and droppy, just using the show me tool at the moment, its very slow though which isn’t  ideal.

11:09 Turns out Joe has had exactly the same idea as me (he copied my idea) but I’m going to stick with my idea of comparing the UK to other places across the world because I think its going to require too much brain power to find something new to talk about now.

12:13 Power BI dash is now finished, I perhaps didn’t vary the chart types which I used in the dashboard enough but there you go, I think it looks fairly clean and the message that it conveys is clear. This is aided by the fact that I’ve written into a text box the message that it’s supposed to convey, probably cheating but there you go. I think I’m aiming for a ‘Looks good’ from Andy on this one, anything better than that is well under par.

13:10 treated myself to an actual hour long lunch break, feely a bit guilty but I’m ready to work on my tableau dashboard now, got 2 hours to build it and I already sort of know my way around the data, hopefully I can get something cool made today.

13:38 Tableau is going much better, I feel very much more in control using it, having said that I am struggling with a few calcs, sure that will be evened out come showtime.

15:28 Finished the dash, plenty of time to spare (2 mins) Actually don’t mind how this one has ended up, I could have found some more interesting stats to looks at I’m sure and my BANs aren’t particularly interesting but overall I think the stuff I’ve made today is pretty OK. Not a bad days work.

16:13 Got a ‘Looks really good’ from coach Kriebel today – High Praise!

If you want to see my work its on tableau public here https://public.tableau.com/profile/tim1752#!/vizhome/GBRLongTermProductivityDash/GBRdash?publish=yes

Thanks for reading (❁´◡`❁) …. until next time.