Gwilym Lockwood
Gwilym first started serious data analysis during his PhD in the neuroscience of language. He learned how to obtain, clean, process, and visualise data to examine his participants’ brain activity during language learning, but soon realised it was more fun to use those same techniques to look at sports statistics. After honing his data skills through scraping cricinfo and falling in love with ggplot2 in R, he decided to switch out of academia and into the big wide world of data visualisation. Outside the office, Gwilym also brews his own beer, which may or may not help the data viz creative process.
I like big numbers and I cannot lie: how to make numbers pop out from KPI dashboards in Tableau
Good KPI dashboards make their key numbers really pop out of the screen. You want to look at a dashboard and instantly know exactly where things stand. This often means having a whacking great number right at the top. This blog will show you how to make one of those....
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Coxcomb charts in Alteryx and Tableau: your one-stop blog shop.
I've been playing with radial and Coxcomb plots recently, which, like all the best things, are both beautiful and complicated. This sort of chart was pioneered by Florence Nightingale to show military deaths during the Crimean War, and over 150 years later, they're...
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If I had to start all over again…
...I'd have done all kinds of things and not done all kinds of other things. I'd be popular and successful and happy and speak twelve languages and... wait, we're only talking about the Data School? Oh. I'm not sure I'd change anything, to be honest. It'd have been...
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With great data comes great responsibility
Today's blog is on "how to be successful in the Data School". I'm not sure I'm the one to be the judge of that - you'd have to ask Andy whether or not I've been successful - but one thing I keep coming back to and fixating on is basic numeracy and checking your...
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What is the most challenging thing about the Data School?
It's self-reflection blog week at the Data School, and today's topic is "what is the most challenging thing about the Data School?". That's a hard one, to be honest. It's difficult to sit here and think of something that's genuinely challenging, because as soon as I...
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Keeping things regular: how to use schedules on Tableau Server
It's Tableau Server week here at the Data School, and we've been learning about keeping things regular with schedules. Schedules are pretty straightforward - the most difficulty we've had with them as a group is settling on how to pronounce it. You can use schedules...
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ASCII and ye shall receive: approximating graphs in tooltips
One of the exciting announcements from the Tableau conference last month was that we'll soon be able to put graphs inside tooltips. That'll come out in a new release of Tableau at some point in the future, but if you can't wait (or if you're not planning on...
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Using Gantt bars to fill the space between time-series lines (or, you Gantt always get what you want)
I wrote about this quickly in a previous blog, but felt it required a little more attention to detail. Sometimes, it's useful to shade the area between two lines in a time-series plot. For example, here are some ERPs (event-related potentials, a measure of brain...
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Viridis colours in Tableau
When I work in R, I often use the viridis colour palette for my graphs. It's pretty, it's way better for colour blind people than most palettes, and because it diverges more towards each end, the extreme data points stand out. More on that here. Tableau doesn't have...
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All the small things: tips and tricks I picked up when revizzing my PhD work
I spent a while this week creating an interactive viz of my favourite paper from my PhD. This threw up a few small issues that I hadn't come across before. They don't really merit a full blog post each, but they really made a difference to my viz, and I'm sure they'll...
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Tooltips: going beyond simple information
Tooltips are great. They automatically capture the information that goes into the view (and more that you can drag in besides), and then pop up when you explore the viz. For example, here's a tooltip from one of my first vizzes at the Data School. It's a visualisation...
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Using dummy variables for sizing Gantt Bars in Tableau
I was looking at UK population statistics recently to see how the rates of births, deaths, immigration, and emigration rates have changed over the last few decades. I had a bit of an issue with Gantt bars in Tableau while doing this. Dragging the size control all the...
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Simple filters and parameter filters
This blog post is about the difference between regular filters and parameter filters in Tableau. It uses the same dataset of my Spotify listening history that I used in my last blog about sets and groups. With a regular filter, you can drag a dimension onto the viz...
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Sets and groups and rock and roll
It's teaching week at The Data School, and I'm doing sets and groups. Quite a lot of it is straightforward, but one useful trick I've learned is using combined sets to get around those times when level of detail calculations might not work and/or might be too...
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Getting around Tableau level of detail calculations in Alteryx
I'm about a month into my Data School training now, and the thing I've found most frustrating about Tableau so far is doing calculated fields. Simple ones are fine, because I can think through the logic. For example, take this dataset where I'm looking at the...
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Calculating the top n percent in Alteryx: different methods, different results.
There are two ways of calculating top whatever percent of things in Alteryx. Actually, that's probably not true, there are probably several different ways, each more convoluted than the last, but I have found two straightforward ways of doing it. These examples come...
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Alteryx for R Souls: summarize
One thing I do miss about R is that dplyr and ggplot2 used British (well, NZ) English spelling. Alteryx uses American English spelling, but when you love something, you love it despite its flaws. So it goes for the Summarize tool. We've been doing a lot of Alteryx...
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Alteryx for R Souls: an introduction to macros
Most guides to macros in Alteryx copy and paste the phrase "a macro is a workflow that has the flexibility to be run as a single tool within another workflow". I don't find this a particularly informative definition. Instead, to put it in R terminology, a tool is like...
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