2020: Week 1

Welcome to Preppin' Data 2020! If you are returning from completing some of the challenges in 2019 then welcome back. If you are joining us for the first time then here's a quick overview of how the Preppin' Data challenges work:

  1. The CHALLENGE is set in a post like this, often released on a Wednesday. You'll get:
    1. The Business case / positioning for the challenge
    2. The Requirements clearly laid out including the data input
    3. The Output file and the structure that file should have
    4. A link to fill in the participation tracker so you can see how you are progressing in the viz here.
  2. The SOLUTION post posted the following Tuesday or later depending on what the Dr Preppers have going on in there non-Preppin' lives.
There are loads of places to get started with Tableau Prep. The videos by Tableau here are great and we've produced a load of 'How to...' articles to help guide you through some of the datary basics you need as well as some more of the complex techniques you will come across. 

One final point - no you don't have to use Tableau Prep for the challenges. We love seeing submissions from any tool (Alteryx, R, Python, SQL etc) with blogs / pictures of how you have completed the challenges but the challenges will be focused on being possible in Tableau Prep. 

So on with 2020's challenges...
                       ___________________________________________________
Whilst reading through some great Tableau blogs over the Holidays, the bosses at Chin & Beard Suds Co. (our fake soap company that might have the worst data in history) stumbled across Ryan Sleeper's post on Financial Statements (tip 6) and decided they needed a nice Profit statement for their board meetings from here on. Sadly our data isn't structured like we would ideally like so your challenge this week is to automate the production of the profit statement. 

Requirement


  • Input the data set
  • Find the profit totals for X items
  • Find the profit sub-totals for X.X items
  • Add the relevant values to the relevant items by replacing the nulls
  • Add the leading spaces:
    • 5 spaces for X.X items
    • 10 spaces for X.X.X items
    • NOTE: Do not manually rename these there is a function that will help!
  • Output the data (not csv or you'll lose the spacing)

Output

One file: 
  • Two Columns:
    • Item
    • Profit
  • 31 Rows (32 incl Headers)
The outputs can be found here for comparison. Don’t forget to fill the participation tracker and share your solutions using #PreppinData on Twitter.

Popular posts from this blog

2024: Week 1 - Prep Air's Flow Card

Image
Created by: Carl Allchin Welcome to a New Year of Preppin' Data challenges. For anyone new to the challenges then let us give you an overview how the weekly challenge works.  Each Wednesday the Preppin' crew (Jenny, myself or a guest contributor) drop a data set(s) that requires some reshaping and/or cleaning to get it ready for analysis.  You can use any tool or language you want to do the reshaping (we build the challenges in Tableau Prep but love seeing different tools being learnt / tried). Share your solution on LinkedIn, Twitter/X, GitHub or the Tableau Forums Fill out our tracker so you can monitor your progress and involvement The following Tuesday we will post a written solution in Tableau Prep (thanks Tom) and a video walkthrough too (thanks Jenny) As with each January for the last few years, we'll set a number of challenges aimed at beginners. This is a great way to learn a number of fundamental data preparation skills or a chance to learn a new tool — New Year&
Read more

2023: Week 1 The Data Source Bank

Image
 Created by: Carl Allchin Welcome to a New Year of Preppin' Data. These are weekly exercises to help you learn and develop data preparation skills. We publish the challenges on a Wednesday and share a solution the following Tuesday. You can take the challenges whenever you want and we love to see your solutions. With data preparation, there is never just one way to complete the tasks so sharing your solutions will help others learn too. Share on Twitter, LinkedIn, the Tableau Forums or wherever you want to too. Tag Jenny Martin, Tom Prowse or myself or just use the #PreppinData to share your solutions.  The challenges are designed for learning Tableau Prep but we have a broad community who complete the challenges in R, Python, SQL, DBT, EasyMorph and many other tools. We love seeing people learn new tools so feel free to use whatever tools you want to complete the challenges.  A New Year means we start afresh so January's challenges will be focused on beginners. We will use dif
Read more

How to...Handle Free Text

Image
Free isn't always a good thing. In data, Free text is the example to state when proving that statements correct. However, lots of benefit can be gained from understanding data that has been entered in Free Text fields. What do we mean by Free Text? Free Text is the string based data that comes from allowing people to type answers in to systems and forms. The resulting data is normally stored within one column, with one answer per cell. As Free Text means the answer could be anything, this is what you get - absolutely anything. From expletives to slang, the words you will find in the data may be a challenge to interpret but the text is the closest way to collect the voice of your customer / employee. The Free Text field is likely to contain long, rambling sentences that can simply be analysed. If you count these fields, you are likely to have one of each entry each. Therefore, simply counting the entries will not provide anything meaningful to your analysis. The value is in
Read more