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What did I use to make my first interactive dashboard?
Google Sheets (Light data cleaning on files that could handle it)
BigQuery (SQL- clean and analyze data)
Google Sheets again- creating a table with analyzed data
Tableau (visualizing my data)
Wow- a lot of work went into this one simple dashboard.
I started a little over a week ago on my first Capstone Project. I was given a case study about a cycle company who think that converting their casual users to subscribers would increase their profit- so they want to understand the differences between these two groups. Then I was directed to a whole lot of data, given some guiding questions and suggestions, and set free on my first real project.
Was I overwhelmed at first? Yes. Did I spend a lot of time doing things that I would eventually re-do, but better? Also yes. Was I proud of myself every time I accomplished a new query or table that I came up with myself? Absolutely!
I kept track of all of the queries I ran, in order, with some reasoning (and rambling). You can find that file here. As I went along, I really challenged myself to do things the most efficient way, and to learn how to do things I did not understand. Analyzing the data took me the better part of the week. At some point, I realized that I was so nervous about visualizing the data because I did not feel confident in how I would do it, that I was lingering too long on my analysis steps. So, I finished up the analysis I was doing and popped over to Tableau to get to work.
Once in Tableau, I felt straight away like I had no idea what I was doing. At least with SQL I felt like I had the basics and everything was just figuring how to do it better and faster from there. In Tableau however, I spent a long time just moving different names and values from one box to another and seeing what would happen. Slowly, my visualizations started to take shape, and I started to feel more confident in what I was doing.
After a few days of this, I finally took a step back and asked myself "What is the purpose of this visualization I am making? Who is it for? What is the best format?". I decided that the data is not really that complicated, so my best bet would be to get all of the information into one clear, interactive dashboard. I sat down to do that and several hours later, I was finished.
Every step of the way in making this project, I was so excited to be doing the work finally. Every time I had to close my computer to go do something else, I felt disappointed. Each time I went back to my computer to start up again, I could practically feel the dopamine hitting my brain. Doing this project brought it home for me that I am on the right path with this "data analytics" stuff, because I do love it.
To interact with my completed viz, click here.
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