For this assignment, I chose the Wildlife data set. I uploaded into Tableau and was immediately overwhelmed at how many different measures and values there were! I don't think I've dealt with a data set with that many values. Even so, I knew I wanted to do something simple, so I wouldn't get lost among the numbers.
I started out by pulling the time value in to the sheet. For me, time in years is a logical start as a column because it is a steady unit with zero variation.
I then dragged the count data into the second column, to give me an idea of the numbers I was dealing with.
Then, I played around with the ascending and descending filters, seeing if I should change the years to months. I ultimately decided to leave the years as is, because if I switched them to months it would have made the data an unreasonable size.
I then converted the data to a bar chart, which you can see on the right. I didn't really like this way of organizing the data, as it felt disorganized and a little off. I played around a little more, until I realized the timeline would be perfect (DUH!) You can see that attached right below.
Some questions I have about the data follow:
Why has the data increased every year?
Why does it seem to alternate years?
What happened between 2005 and 2009 that caused the growth to slow so drastically?
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