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Dashboard Week (2/5) : Where and Who Taps Opal Cards

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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Day 2 of Dashboard Week was about using the Transport NSW API to scrape Sydney Trains related data. The API offers a wide variety of data, but I went for Opal Taps. The Data primarily consisted of taps by card type and route taken over the past 3 years. I thought small multiples was a nice approach to this visualization, and it is a chart type that I haven’t tried before, so I gave it a go.

Andy Kriebel has a very useful tutorial posted on vizwiz’s Tableau Tip Tuesday for creating Small Multiples.

Below are a  few challenges that I faced that are worth noting :

  1. Tableau Public does not remember custom label positions for more than one layout ( if the parameter is changed the custom positions of the labels change on Public)
  2. MY Date fields can’t be formatted in Tableau, so if you really want a truncated MY field (Feb-18 instead of February-2018) make your date dimension MONTH and then custom format that to mmm-yy

This is the link to the Dashboard for an interactive version of this.

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