This blog will demonstrate how to combine Alteryx and Tableau to create a Melbourne Cup Dashboard.
The data I used in this blog is from this website. Due to the difference in the data structure, I only used the table result from 2012 to 2021.
The basic method of creating this dashboard is that I first downloaded and extracted the data using Alteryx and then exported the data to Tableau to create the visualization.
For Data scrapping and cleaning in Alteryx
The data wrangling started with web scraping. To extract the data that we want from the website, we need to iteratively parse the URL lists from the list of URLs.
Then in each iteration, we need to use three regex tools to tokenize the data to make them be presented as shown in the following picture. Therefore, I created a Standard Macro to help us tokenize the data for each year.
If you look at the data structure from different years’ result tables, you will find they are not the same. For example, some tables do not contain Penalty fields. And many fields’ names are not consistent. In order to union all the results from each iteration, I modified the standard macro to make sure the field names keep consistent by applying a few Multiple Field Formula tools.
At last, I created an iterative macro and inserted the standard macro into the interactive macro to output the Merged result of all the years.
At last, I did some data cleaning in the main workflow after the iterative macro as well like getting rid of the unit to enable further calculations in Tableau. After the data cleaning, I output the result into a hyper file for developing visualization in Tableau.
For Data visualization in Tableau
The dashboard I created for this challenge consisted of three charts. The map on the top shows a comparison of the number of horses that have won the top 10 among different countries.
If you click the shapes on the map, it will pop up a bump chart which will allow the user to see the performance rank change over time among different countries. Clicking more shapes will bring more countries into comparison.
The Bottom bar chart shows the average performance of horses in different countries. If you click the bar, it will drill down to the horse level to show the horse in top performance in that country.
You can access the dashboard through this link.