Creating a Google COVID-19 Mobility Dashboard in Tableau

As a response to COVID-19, Google aggregated, anonymized insights from products such as Google Maps to support Public Health Authorities in making critical decisions to combat COVID-19

However, this is not just used by Public Health Authorities, but also organisations of all sizes

The Google Mobility Data Set is currently available to Download for a limited time, however, I have also uploaded a Snapshot of the data for you

Now that we have downloaded the Google Mobility Data, we will have a quick look at the data together

In this section, we are going to focus on building our individual Worksheets; we will be building the following set of Worksheets for each of the six metrics

• Most Recent Mobility

• Trend Over Time

• Moving Average

In this lesson, we are going to be creating a Worksheet to highlight the Most Recent Mobility value; we will then replicate the Worksheet for each of the six mobility metrics

In this lesson, we are going to be creating a Worksheet to highlight Trend Over Time; we will then replicate the Worksheet for each of the six mobility metrics

In this lesson, we are going to be creating a Worksheet to show a Moving Average; we will then replicate the Worksheet for each of the six mobility metrics

In this section, we created our various worksheets, and in the next section, we will work on assembling these into our final dashboard

In the last section, we created our various worksheets, and in this next section, we will work on assembling these to create our final dashboard

There is still work to be done, but I hope you enjoy this section

In this lesson, we are going to obtain our six colours from the Google Mobility Website

==============================

Orange (Workplaces)

• RGB (213, 110, 12)

• HEX (#d56e0c)

Green (Parks)

• RGB (24, 128, 56)

• HEX (#188038)

Blue (Retail):

• RGB(25, 103, 210)

• HEX (#1967d2)

Pink (Transit):

• RGB(208, 24, 132)

• HEX (#d01884)

Purple (Residential):

• RGB (132, 48, 206)

• HEX (#8430ce)

Turquoise (Pharmacy)

• RGB (18, 158, 175)

• HEX (#129eaf)

In this lesson, we are going to obtain our six images required for the Google Mobility Website

In this lesson, we are going look at using Vertical and Horizontal Containers to ensure that we can perfectly format our dashboard

In this lesson, we are going to create a parameter to enable the user to Dynamic Toggle between the Trend Over Time and the Moving Average Worksheets in our Dashboard

In this lesson, we are going to use the Hide and Show Functionality to show additional information to our users

================================

Retail and Recreation
Mobility trends for places like restaurants, cafes, shopping centers, theme parks, museums, libraries, and movie theaters

Parks
Mobility trends for places like national parks, public beaches, marinas, dog parks, plazas, and public gardens

Grocery & Pharmacy
Mobility trends for places like grocery markets, food warehouses, farmers markets, specialty food shops, drug stores, and pharmacies

Residential
Mobility trends for places of residence

Workplace
Mobility trends for places of work

Transit Stations
Mobility trends for places like public transport hubs such as subway, bus, and train stations

================================

About this Dashboard

This data set is intended to help remediate the impact of COVID-19. It shouldn’t be used for medical diagnostic, prognostic or treatment purposes. Nor is it intended to be used for guidance on personal travel plans.

The data shows how visits to places, such as corner shops and parks, are changing in each geographic region. Location accuracy and the understanding of categorised places varies from region to region, so we don’t recommend using this data to compare changes between countries, or between regions with different characteristics (e.g. rural versus urban areas).

We’ll leave a region out of the report if we don’t have statistically significant levels of data. To learn how we calculate these trends and preserve privacy.

About this Data

These reports show how visits and length of stay at different places change compared to a baseline. We calculate these changes using the same kind of aggregated and anonymised data used to show popular times for places in Google Maps. Changes for each day are compared to a baseline value for that day of the week:

- The baseline is the median value, for the corresponding day of the week, during the fiveweek period 3 Jan – 6 Feb 2020.

- The reports show trends over several weeks with the most recent data representing approximately 2–3 days ago (this is how long it takes to produce the reports).

The data that is included in the calculation depends on user settings, connectivity and whether it meets our privacy threshold. If the privacy threshold isn’t met (when somewhere isn’t busy enough to ensure anonymity) we don’t show a change for the day.

We include categories that are useful for social distancing efforts, as well as access to essential services. We calculate these insights based on data from users who have opted in to Location History for their Google Account, so that the data represents a sample of our users. As with all samples, this may or may not represent the exact behaviour of a wider population.

We continue to improve our reports as places close and reopen. We updated the way that we calculate changes for groceries and pharmacy, retail and recreation, public transport stations and parks categories. For regions published before May 2020, the data may contain a consistent shift (up or down) which starts between 11–18 April 2020.

Preserving Privacy

These reports were developed to be helpful while adhering to our stringent privacy protocols and protecting people’s privacy. No personally identifiable information, like an individual’s location, contacts or movement, is made available at any point.

Insights in these reports are created with aggregated, anonymised sets of data from users who have turned on the Location History setting, which is off by default. People who have Location History turned on can choose to turn it off at any time from their Google Account and can always delete Location History data directly from their Timeline.

These reports are powered by the same worldclass anonymisation technology that we use in our products every day and that keep your activity data private and secure. These reports use differential privacy, which adds artificial noise to our data sets enabling high-quality results without identifying any individual person. These privacy-preserving protections also ensure that the absolute number of visits isn’t shared.

Further Resources

To learn how you can get the most out of this report in your work, visit Mobility Reports Help.

To get the latest report, visit https://google.com/covid19/mobility

In this lesson, we are going to create a Mobile Dashboard Layout so that our users can view our dashboard on different devices

In this section, we assembled our Google COVID-19 Mobility Dashboard, I hope that you learned a few interesting new tricks along the way

Where there is a beginning there is an end, and I am thankful that you have made it this far, and hopefully, you have learned a lot from this course. We are going to review the entire course and talk about our journey.

• Exploring Google Mobility Data

• Building Worksheets

• Assembling the Dashboard

• Formatting

• Mobile Dashboard Layout

• Various Tableau Techniques

Given you have come all this way and completed the course, you will understand more about creating dashboards in Tableau, and hopefully, they will spark off your imagination.

The main thing is that practice makes perfect

While I have trained thousands of people in person, I hope that you have enjoyed it and I do hope that you stay connected and let me know about your progress.

Do reach out and connect with me on my various platforms.