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Dashboard Week Day 4: Boston 311 Service Requests

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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Last day of Dashboard Week!! Today, we only had 5 hours to build the dashboard, luckily we didn’t need to use Alteryx.  The data we were given was on 311 Service requests for Boston, one csv per year starting from 2014.  This was a big data set.

In Tableau, I unioned all the csv files to get data for all the years of interest. We had Zip code and Addresses per service request so I wanted to look at where the service requests were coming from over the years and what type of requests were they.

I chose to look into 2020 and 2021, a large number of Zip codes were missing for these years.  The Zip codes were also available in the address so I extracted them from the address using a calculation.

This is the dashboard I built.

 

Dashboard Week is no doubt challenging but it also showed me how much I have grown since the beginning of my training, in week 1 I couldn’t imagine building a dashboard in a day.

 

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