Exporting Robot Scouter Data Into Tableau: A Step-By-Step Guide
Just 4 steps and a half!
So you’ve collected a bunch of scouting data using Robot Scouter and now you’re ready to export the data. That’s awesome! This article will go through the process of getting data exported off the app and imported into a computer, and then into Tableau if wanted. If you have no idea what we’re talking about here, make sure to check out this article first.
Step 1: When you’re ready to export your scouting data, open Robot Scouter on any device of your choosing and open the side panel by tapping the ‘burger’ icon (☰) located on the top left corner. Then, press ‘Export all teams.’
Step 1.5: Make sure Robot Scouter has finished exporting all of the data (You can check on its progress by opening your device’s drop-down menu)
Step 2: Connect the device you exported the data on to a computer, and navigate to that device’s storage with your file explorer. Robot Scouter exports to the ‘Documents’ folder on my Samsung phone but you might have to do a bit more digging around if you’re using a different device. Each time the export button is pressed, the app creates a folder called ‘Robot Scouter export_’ with a string of numbers corresponding to the time of export.
After opening up the folder corresponding to your particular export, you should see a few JSON and Excel files depending on how many different scouting templates have been used. Our scouts used two different scouting templates(forms) this year and the data collected with each one is exported separately. The Excel file is the analytics spreadsheet that’s automatically created by the app.
Copy the entire export folder to somewhere on your computer and give it a more useful name (ex. Q41 to indicate that the folder contains all the scouting data up to qualification match 41)
If you just want the scouting data exported from Robot Scouter and imported into a computer, you’re all done! That wasn’t too bad at all, was it? If you want to put your data into Tableau however, keep reading on!
Step 2.5: Install the data transformation program, RStoCSV, by following the instructions located here.
Step 3: In your terminal of choice, navigate to the RStoCSV directory and enter the following:
A file selector window should pop up. Find the scouting data you want to convert, select the file, and press ‘Open’.
…And voila! There’s your data converted into CSV format and ready to be put into Tableau!
In this example, we simply ran the basic transformation script with python convert.py In reality, our team would’ve added the -f flag and ran python convert.py -f "Scout Name" . This is because RStoCSV can actually delete empty scouting forms. With the -f flag, we tell the program that any scouting forms without an entry for the given field is empty and should be deleted. In our example, any scouting forms without an entry in the “Scout Name” field would be deleted by the program.
Step 4: Open Tableau Desktop and click ‘More…’ under ‘Connect to a file’ on the left sidebar. In the file selector window that pops up, navigate to your converted scouting data and open it up (Remember that it’s the CSV file, not the JSON).
Congrats! Your scouting data is now in Tableau and ready to be analyzed !
