Introduction

Last weekend I was following Alex Freberg's tutorial for Data Analyst Portfolio Projects, in which he showed how to explore data with SQL and make a dashboard in Tableau. It was a fantastic video and I was able to build a dashboard about some basic COVID-19 data. I could have stopped there, but for some reasons, I was not yet satisfied.

First of all, this dashboard is currently "static", which goes against the primary purpose of dashboard: "showing and updating live, incoming data in real time" (Google).. Not to mention that, COVID-19 data is among the most frequently monitored and up-to-the-minute data in the world. That means if the data shown in our dashboard is more than a few days old, it would be almost meaningless. If I want to keep it up-to-date, I would have to repeat the entire process frequently (which, as you might imagine, is really time-consuming)

To remedy this issue, I came up with the idea of an automatically updated dashboard. After some more researches, I sketched out a plan of what needs to be done (repeatedly) to maintain our dashboard.

The plan:

The data is loaded from the source, manipulated and saved to my local drive.
The downloaded data is imported into my SQL Server database.
A query will be performed with the data in SQL, and the output is saved onto a Google Sheets.
The data from Google Sheets will be updated in Tableau once per day.
And repeat.

"That sounds simple enough", I thought. "Just like that movie Edge of Tomorrow, isn't it*?"*

As it turned out, it really is simple with the help of 🐍 Python.

In the following sections, I'll guide you through how I leverage Python programming to automate the necessary tasks. I'll also narrate my thought process (ie: why do this and not that, etc...) so that you can understand the reasons behind each decision. I hope you'll get an idea of how an automation project might work (or at least have some fun reading this).

At the end of this project, we'll have a dashboard that can updates itself:

A snapshot of my "live" dashboard.

If you want to check out the finished product and the code I've written, you can find them here:

For more about me, you can refer to these links:

Before, we begin, I have a few statements to make:

With that out of the way, let's start making a Tableau Dashboard that Updates Automatically with Python.

Project Overview

(This is the part where I describe the project in details for scientific purposes. If you already understand the main ideas behind what we're doing, feel free to skip ahead and dive right into the process.)

Expected outcome

Table of Contents

Introduction

Project Overview