Okay, so I decided to mess around with some US Open data in Tableau the other day. I’m a bit of a tennis fan, and the tournament was coming up, so it felt like a fun little project.
First thing, I had to actually find some data. This wasn’t super straightforward. I spent a bit of time poking around online, looking for match results, player stats, historical winners, stuff like that. Eventually, I stumbled upon a couple of decent CSV files. One had match-by-match results for recent years, and another had a list of champions going way back.
Getting the data ready was the next step. You know how it is, raw data is always a bit messy. I opened the files up, probably in Excel first, just to eyeball them. Had to do some basic cleaning – standardizing some names, making sure the dates were in a format Tableau would like, checking for obvious errors or blank spots. Merged the two files based on the year and winner’s name where it made sense. It took a little while to get it looking usable.
Then, I fired up Tableau. Imported the cleaned-up data source. Tableau shows you all the fields on the left, and honestly, my first thought was, “Okay, where do I even start?”
Making Sense of the Numbers
I decided to just dive in. I started simple.
- I dragged ‘Winner Country’ onto the view. Tableau suggested a map, which looked pretty cool. Lots of winners from the US, obviously, but neat to see the spread.
- Then I wanted to see who won the most titles. Dragged ‘Winner Name’ to Rows and ‘Number of Records’ (or a count of wins) to Columns. Sorted it descending. Easy peasy, got a basic bar chart showing the legends.
- I tried making a timeline showing the duration of the final match over the years. Put ‘Year’ on Columns and ‘Match Duration (minutes)’ on Rows. Changed it to a line chart. That was interesting, seemed like matches got longer? Or maybe the data was spotty for older years.
Putting it on a Dashboard
Okay, so I had a few separate worksheets going. The next logical step was to combine them into a dashboard so they could work together.
I created a new dashboard sheet. Started dragging my map, the bar chart of champions, and the timeline onto the canvas. This part always takes longer than I think. Just getting things lined up, resizing them so they don’t look cramped or too empty. Fiddled with the layout quite a bit.
I wanted some interactivity. Added a filter for ‘Year’. So you could select a specific year and see the champion and maybe map highlight the country. Also made it so clicking on a country on the map would filter the list of champions from that country. That worked pretty well after a bit of clicking around in the settings.
Finishing Touches
Finally, I spent some time on the little things.
- Played with the color schemes. Tried to make it look somewhat ‘US Open’-ish, maybe using blues and whites, but didn’t go crazy.
- Cleaned up the tooltips – you know, the little boxes that pop up when you hover over stuff. Made sure they showed useful info clearly.
- Gave everything sensible titles.
Overall, it came out alright. It’s not going to win any awards, but it was a good exercise. Went from finding raw data to cleaning it, exploring in Tableau, building views, and putting together an interactive dashboard. Definitely reminded me how much work goes into even a simple visualization project, especially the data prep part. But it was satisfying to see the final thing working, showing some interesting bits about the tournament history.
