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Dashboard Week ( 1/5) : Melbourne Cup- REGEX Party

This post was originally published on The Data School blog between 2018 and July 2025, before our program was renamed to MIP’s Analytics Career Accelerator. References throughout this article to “The Data School” or “DS” all refer to what is now MIP’s Analytics Career Accelerator. The program, its people, and its commitment to launching outstanding analytics careers remain the same – just under a new name.

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On Day 1 of the Dashboard week, the challenge was to parse three Melbourne Cup Data Sets and choose one or more to visualize in Tableau. This was an Alteryx intensive task and required mostly the regex tool.

Below is a summary of Regex Expressions I found Useful :

1. Match text between two characters : ((.*?)) — here the parenthesis are the chosen characters and this tokenizes every word within parenthesis.

2. The First Two ( or more) words in a String from the beginning of the line: ([^s]+s+[^s]+|[^s]+)

3. The last word in a line : s(w+)$

After Cleaning the data, I could get a bit creative with this Tableau friendly data set.

I took this opportunity to revisit on three learning instances we had come about last week.

  1. Set Actions
  2. Rounded Bar Charts
  3. Tool tip Dashboards

I am still dumbfounded by how smooth Set Actions are and how much value they can add to a dashboard. Definitely the best feature in 2018.3.

To interact with the dashboard click here.

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