2019 Week 4: Headcount Tracking

Hello and welcome to week 4 of Workout Wednesday 2019, and my first contribution as an official team member! This week’s challenge should be on the easier side, and forces us to think a little bit about data prep, before we get to producing our Workout Wednesday visualization.

I was recently challenged at work to product additional rows of data between two dates, all while staying within the confines of Tableau. Assuming you don’t have Alteryx, SQL skills/tools, or other data prep tools… how would you use Tableau and every day applications (Excel, Google Docs, etc) to enhance your data set? For this week’s challenge, I want you to use Tableau Desktop’s data source page to enhance your base data set. Keep an eye on the number of records, it is a key requirement this week!

Requirements

• Data prep requirements
  • I’ve provided a scaffold of dates in the file that should be used to extend the employee level data
    • Using the data source page, combine the employees data and the dates data into a single data source
    • Important… bring in only dates that fall between an employee’s hire date and termination date. If an employee has no termination date, use today’s date. Example: employee 2 should have 141 records before extracting (every date between 3/1/2018 and 7/19/2018)
    • Your final extract should have exactly 5,947 records
• Dashboard requirements
  • Dashboard size: 1000 x 600, and should contain no more than 3 sheets
  • Create a summary number that represents how many active employees we have on the latest date left in the data after data prep is complete
  • Create a line and dot combo chart with a mark for every day. When there are gains in employees, highlight that date with a gray circle. When there are losses in employees, highlight that date with a red circle. Size the circles by the absolute volume of the gain/loss.
  • Create a volume chart below the line chart that shows employee gain/loss by day
  • Match formatting, colors, and tooltips as closely as possible
    • Note the positive, neutral, and negative number format in the tooltips. Gains should be displayed as +n, 0 gain/loss days should be displayed as 0, and losses should be displayed as -n. Do not create three fields to accomplish this behavior.

Dataset

This week uses fake headcount data stored in Google Drive.  Connect to the data in Tableau by using the Google Sheets connection, and this link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DO9bKM4dFVc4q_cID3VACoxVn3mQ5ipbd8owNXXprrY/edit?usp=sharing

Attribute

When you publish your solution on Tableau Public make sure to take the time and include a link to the original inspiration.