A few weeks ago I saw the following tweet in my timeline.
Got data u need transforming & dont have the time/tools to do it? Tweet me your problem & Ill select 1 a week to feel the power of @alteryx pic.twitter.com/8WLkSopgdj
— Brian Prestidge (@BrianPrestidge) January 25, 2017
I have previously interviewed Brian when he was still working in the world of professional sport for Bolton. Brian now works for the Information Lab who specialize in Alteryx and Tableau. In order for me to improve at Tableau I am always on the look out for free data that I have a real interest in.
CricSheet.org is a great source of freely available Cricket data. They have over 3,000 matches covering all formats of the game. The structure of the individual match files means you need to do a bit of manipulation (to each file) before you can merge and work with a large set of data.
So I asked Brian could he do something to tidy these files and merge the data.
@BrianPrestidge How about merging a chunk of games from this site into 1 file with all the info fields on each line? https://t.co/2kpuzDFeWX
— Rob Carroll (@thevideoanalyst) January 31, 2017
Brian has but together a video of the full process here
And has very kindly made the data available here.
I was very impressed with how it all worked and how repeatable the whole exercise would be as more games get added. As a rule I find analysts spend too much time organising and sorting data rather than analysing it.
Start getting your requests in for next week. Any data, for work or for fun – let me know what you want doing and you never know… #Alteryx https://t.co/9ap52CUvi6
— Brian Prestidge (@BrianPrestidge) February 17, 2017