Day 2 of Dashboard Week was upon me today and what can I say? Well it was a bit of a disaster!
Our task was to web scrape the details from the Historic-uk website, for all the details relating to historic battles that have happened throughout the UK. This seemed like quite a nice task at first, after seeing the setup of the website, however there were some ‘messy’ elements with certain areas not being in a similar structure. As a result of this, a lot of RegEx was involved in order to get all of the records.
Alteryx Workflow
Here’s an image of my Alteryx workflow, as I mentioned RegEx was definitely on the menu! However, looking back at this I could have probably completed this is a much (much!) more efficient way. But I got the results that I wanted, and learnt a lot along the way.
Tableau Dashboard
This is where I really struggled and wasted a lot of time! At first the data wasn’t in a particularly Tableau friendly manor with lots of text, meaning it was harder to create meaningful graphs.
My initial idea was to create a timeline where the viewer would be able to see the different battles overtime. After researching this, I decided that a snake/curved timeline graph would be great to visualise this type of scenario. However, many attempts I couldn’t quite structure the data in the correct way and just ended up with a lot of jagged lines going across the page.
After wasting a lot of time trying to get this to work, I decided to abandon this idea and just create a dashboard to get myself over the line. The final product is no where near sometime I would be happy with, but at least it’s something uploaded!
Let’s hope tomorrow will be a lot more successful!