Cecily Santiago

Cecily Santiago is a Tableau/Alteryx Consultant at The Data School, New York. She has a MS in Mathematics from the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities and a BA in Mathematics from Mount Holyoke College. After receiving her Masters, she moved to NYC to work for a non profit supporting mathematically gifted, underrepresented students before deciding to pursue a career in data analysis.

Cecily’s passion for logic and design that drew her to data analysis show up in her hobbies too, from playing puzzle and strategy games to appreciating a well-plated dinner or assembling a killer outfit. She also enjoys reading fiction while curled up with her cat, tending to houseplants while listening to podcasts, or exploring the city while catching up with her favorite people.

Certifications

Blog Posts

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Thu 23 Jan 2025 | Cecily Santiago
How To: Create a Music Player in a Tableau Dashboard
Recently, I worked on Mike Monsoon's Progress Journal, a project management/album progress tracker dashboard for the musician Mike Monsoon, who releases his music on SoundCloud
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Tue 12 Nov 2024 | Cecily Santiago
Insight Out: Understanding Tableau's Admin Insights
Recently, I worked on a project for a client using Tableau's Admin Insights. The documentation provided by Tableau is sparse, so I had to experiment and investigate in order to understand the data sources I was working with
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Fri 14 Jun 2024 | Cecily Santiago
Dynamic Zone Visibility Without Calculated Fields
There is a known issue in some versions of Tableau where when using calculated fields from an extract with dynamic zone visibility or dynamic axis titles, refresh extracts fail. If you come across that bug, you might want to use dynamic zone visibility (DZV) without using calculated fields
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Fri 14 Jun 2024 | Cecily Santiago
Chart Swapping Without DZV in Tableau
There is a known issue in some versions of Tableau where when using calculated fields from an extract with dynamic zone visibility or dynamic axis titles, refresh extracts fail. If you come across that bug, you might want to swap charts without using dynamic zone visibility (DZV)
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Wed 12 Jun 2024 | Cecily Santiago
Alteryx Auto Insights: Usage, Requirements, Reflections
A couple months ago, I attended an Alteryx Cloud Training provided by Alteryx to Data School consultants, which covered several of their cloud products including the exciting Alteryx Auto Insights
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Fri 26 Apr 2024 | Cecily Santiago
How-To: Build a Trellis of Line Charts in Tableau
A trellis chart is a grid where each cell in the grid is the same chart type with the same x- and y-axes but filtered to a different value for some dimension. These can be a useful way to view and compare many values at once
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Fri 26 Apr 2024 | Cecily Santiago
How-To: Build a Trellis of Donut Charts in Tableau
A trellis chart is a grid where each cell in the grid is the same chart type with the same x- and y-axes but filtered to a different value for some dimension. These can be a useful way to view and compare many values at once
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Wed 24 Apr 2024 | Cecily Santiago
How-To: Build a Trellis of Bar Charts in Tableau
A trellis chart is a grid where each cell in the grid is the same chart type with the same x- and y-axes but filtered to a different value for some dimension. These can be a useful way to view and compare many values at once
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Fri 26 Apr 2024 | Cecily Santiago
How-To: Set Up a Trellis Chart in Tableau
A trellis chart is a grid where each cell in the grid is the same chart type with the same x- and y-axes but filtered to a different value for some dimension. For example, you could have a grid where each cell is a line chart of sales over time with each cell showing sales in a different state
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Fri 12 Apr 2024 | Cecily Santiago
How-To: Automatically Deselect Marks in Tableau
Have you ever wanted to disable selection of marks in your vizzes in Tableau? Maybe your users are meant to click on marks for interactivity, but you don't like the way marks get outlined after they're clicked
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Thu 04 Apr 2024 | Cecily Santiago
How-To: Remove Unwanted Highlighting on BANs, KPI Cards & Text Sheets in Tableau
Have you ever used the Tableau hack to remove unwanted highlighting on a dashboard, but found that your BANs, KPI Cards, or other Text Sheets didn't respond as you expected? The hack to remove unwanted highlighting for most charts and marks boils down to the following: 1
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Wed 03 Apr 2024 | Cecily Santiago
How do I add DONUT CHARTS over a FILLED MAP in Tableau?
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Tue 02 Apr 2024 | Cecily Santiago
How do I dynamically switch elements on a Tableau dashboard? Dynamic Zone Visibility (DZV) How-To
Have you ever wanted to give your dashboard the ability to switch between several charts or change out text boxes? If so, you should learn about Dynamic Zone Visibility (commonly referred to as DZV)
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Fri 29 Mar 2024 | Cecily Santiago
Dashboard Week Day 5 - Iowa Liquor Sales
Today we're working with Iowa Liquor Sales data from 2017-2019. This is the dataset Val used in her application! It'll be interesting to see what she did versus what we end up with. 10 am The data isn't too bad. Getting lat and long for each county from the census data set
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Thu 28 Mar 2024 | Cecily Santiago
Dashboard Week Day 4 - Squirrel Census
Today we were assigned to create an informative dashboard using the Squirrel Census data, a log of squirrel sightings in NYC parks from March 1, 2020. I'll be updating this blog at regular intervals throughout the day with my progress and challenges so far
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Wed 27 Mar 2024 | Cecily Santiago
Dashboard Week Day 3 - Working with .parquet files in Alteryx - Yellow Taxi
Today we were assigned to create an informative dashboard using the 2023 Yellow Taxi data from https://www.nyc.gov/site/tlc/about/tlc-trip-record-data.page. I'll be updating this blog at regular intervals throughout the day with my progress and challenges so far
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Tue 26 Mar 2024 | Cecily Santiago
Dashboard Week Day 2 - UNICEF
Today, we were tasked with building an informative dashboard using UNICEF data. We could choose any of the myriad datasets to work with
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Mon 25 Mar 2024 | Cecily Santiago
Dashboard Week Day 1 - College Scorecard
Today is the first day of Dashboard Week for DSNY Cohort 7! Dashboard Week serves as a capstone for training here at The Data School NY. Each morning, we arrive to find a convo post outlining the assignment for the day
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Tue 23 Jan 2024 | Cecily Santiago
Tableau Hack: Add a Custom Color Palette to Tableau
Tableau has many built-in color palettes that you can select from, but sometimes you might want to create a custom palette. Perhaps you're following brand guidelines, creating your own aesthetic, or theming your dashboard to go with the topic
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Wed 03 Jan 2024 | Cecily Santiago
Tableau Hack: Remove Unwanted Highlighting
In Tableau, marks get highlighted when you click them, causing all other marks to fade into the background
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Thu 28 Dec 2023 | Cecily Santiago
General Steps to Create a New Dashboard in Tableau
You've already created your vizzes and sketched the general layout of your dashboard. You click the icon to create a new dashboard in Tableau. Now what? 1. Delete the phone layout
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Fri 15 Dec 2023 | Cecily Santiago
Start Here: What does one row of data represent?
Last week, our coach Val told us that the most important part of working with a new dataset is understanding what one row of data represents. Experience reinforced this lesson for me while working on my project this week
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Wed 13 Dec 2023 | Cecily Santiago
Quick Concept: Parameters in Tableau
Parameters in Tableau allow the end user to dynamically control a viz or dashboard. Here's a quick overview of how to set them up and some use cases: 1. Create a parameter. This is where you control the options your end user will have. 2. Create a calculated field using the parameter
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Tue 12 Dec 2023 | Cecily Santiago
Quick Concept: Pills in Tableau
In Tableau, the fields from your data source are stored as "pills" that you drag on different shelves to construct your data visualization. These pills have two properties: 1. Discrete or Continuous 2. Dimension or Measure So each pill will have one option from each property
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Thu 07 Dec 2023 | Cecily Santiago
Quick Concept: Pivoting Data
When prepping data for analysis, you'll often have to pivot rows to columns or columns to rows. This is a tricky concept to wrap your head around at first
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