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Dashboard Week Day 2 : London Smart Meters

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 two of dashboard and here we go again! Today’s challenge was more tableau orientated with less data wrangling and extraction required.

The Data

The data provided was related to London smart meters, specifically the energy usage of households over two years. The energy usage was available at a household level for every half hour. Supplementary data also included information about the weather, public holidays, and the socioeconomic level of the households. Quite quickly the data became quite large to handle, so again with time restrictions I decided to focus on two key questions:

  • What are the peak times in terms of household energy usage?
  • Does the weather affect energy usage?

Focusing on these two insights, allowed me to narrow in on the relevant data I needed in Alteryx to parse in a tableau hyper file. Not only did this save time but reducing the size of the data can improve tableau dashboard performance and interactivity speed.

The Dashboard

The dashboard I built had two main components respectively dedicated to each of the insights. Please click on the following screenshot to see the dashboard on tableau public.

A couple of key features that assisted in the formation of this dashboard:

  • Shapes and Dashboard Actions – The combination of shapes and dashboard actions just makes it more visually pleasing for the audience. Instead of having a drop-down parameter/filter list the user can interact with icons of choice instead.
  • Info image and tooltip- By using shapes and setting it to the info image, the tooltip can be used to explain the context and functionality of the dashboard to the user without taking up any space on the dashboard.

That’s all for now, Two down – three to go!

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