Dashboard Week - Day 4 - Candy!

Today was day 4 of dashboard week and the roller-coaster continues! Yesterday was a good day, so today was due to be a tough one again. The task today was looking at the US Candy Hierarchy from  The Science Quarterly Review. There were some rules in place, we couldn’t use Alteryx and we had to complete the dashboard in Tableau Web Edit only.

The data today was all about a survey which focuses on how much someone likes a specific candy. I thought at the start of the day that this could be a good day and fun to make a dashboard… I was wrong!

The initial prep wasn’t so bad, I had decided early that I wanted to visualise the change between 2016 and 2017 so I focused on downloading and cleaning these two files. After a couple steps and pivots in Prep, I was ready to go and had my data in a nicely formatted way. Here’s my Prep flow:

This is where the fun began… this was my first time visualising survey data and I found this a struggle! I found it hard to build the visions that I initially thought, I don’t know if this was an issue within Prep or with the structure of the data but I couldn’t quite work out how to make the chart types.

As a result of this, I thought I would take a bit of a different approach today and build some chart types that I haven’t built before. Therefore, I didn’t really create a dashboard today, but just two different chart types to help visualise the change in rating for each candy.

Here’s the result:

Author:
Tom Prowse
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