Charlie Daffern

Charlie spent four years in the geography department at the University of Cambridge. Most recently she spent nine months completing her MPhil in Polar Studies, during which time she conducted research into the potential of applying remote sensing technologies to studying high latitude vegetation change in Russia.

Having spent four years fighting various pieces of computer software including Matlab, Excel and QGIS during her time studying, it was with mixed feelings of regret and excitement that Charlie only discovered Tableau after she had submitted her masters. She has a particular love of spatial data, but is very much looking forward to the opportunity to learn about the full potentials of Tableau and Alteryx with The Data School.

Charlie spends many evenings and weekends trainings for her favourite sport of ultimate frisbee. In January 2017, she will be representing Great Britain at the Under-24 World Championships in Perth.

Blog Posts

Fri 15 Dec 2017 | Charlie Daffern

Dashboard Day 5: The Final Stand

Dashboard week is almost done and dusted with, and I will absolutely look back on it with fond memories. It’s been variable, and I’ve struggled at times, but I’ve also really enjoyed the creative freedom that we’ve had to just make things

Fri 15 Dec 2017 | Charlie Daffern

Dashboard Day 4: Edit Early!

On the Thursday of Dashboard Week we were tasked with producing a piece of work about cheese. Andy supplied us with an API, which we all gave up on using within about 15 minutes, and a link to cheese.com, with instructions to scrape their cheese data

Tue 12 Dec 2017 | Charlie Daffern

Dashboard Day 2: A Day in the Life

11:03 Data preparation was a struggle. Andy has been kind enough to give us survey data for today (/andy-kriebel/dashboard-week-day2/). Although it’s taken considerably less time than yesterday, I have felt much more strongly stuck at moments this morning than I felt yesterday

Mon 11 Dec 2017 | Charlie Daffern

Dashboard Day 1: Why do Americans move house?

Hey everybody! Welcome to DS7 Dashboard Week. We’ve heard so much about this joyous time – surely there’s no better way to spend a rainy week in December? The task for Day 1 was based on the American Housing Survey dataset. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/ahs

Wed 22 Nov 2017 | Charlie Daffern

Help! (Finding an Alteryx tool)

This week is Alteryx week at the data school! We’ve been learning about macros, APIs, and spatial analysis, amongst other things. Unsurprisingly there have been a few errors standing in our way, leading to a proliferation in our use of the ‘Ctrl+F’ function

Tue 21 Nov 2017 | Charlie Daffern

Cross-Worksheet Filters

So you’ve got a worksheet together, all formatted and ready to go with a nicely set-up filter. Maybe the filter is fairly complex and you’ve used it to exclude particular variables from your view, or perhaps you’re just allowing the user to choose to see only what they’re interested in

Wed 08 Nov 2017 | Charlie Daffern

Tableau Server Usage & Performance Information

You’ve got server deployed in your company. You’re wondering if it’s working

Wed 25 Oct 2017 | Charlie Daffern

Tips on Colour

Towards the end of last week DS7 were joined by Luke Stoughton who took us through a course on visual analytics. Colour is a huge part of any visualization, and should always be an active choice

Fri 20 Oct 2017 | Charlie Daffern

Using Alteryx to Prepare PDF Data from the Gymnastics World Championships

I had a big learning experience whilst preparing my gymnastics data, regarding how to effectively set out data for use in Tableau

Fri 20 Oct 2017 | Charlie Daffern

Bars within Bars on Bar Charts

Want to compare two different measures against the same axis? Have you considered creating a graph with bars within bars? In my gymnastics data set I wanted to take a look at how the average totals scored on each apparatus compared to the average difficulty posted on each apparatus

Thu 19 Oct 2017 | Charlie Daffern

Percent of Total Calculations - with Filters!

An LOD use case. If you calculate % of total with a table calculation… …it looks fine whilst you’ve got all the things in the view… …but as soon as you apply a filter it breaks down… This happens because table calculations are only applied to the things in the view

Wed 18 Oct 2017 | Charlie Daffern

Trim Function in Alteryx

Here’s a tip I found to meet a need in preparing my gymnastics data set. I downloaded the data in a hideous PDF format, and so there was a good amount of cleaning that needed doing. The ‘Trim’ function came in very useful for sorting out the Nationality field

Tue 17 Oct 2017 | Charlie Daffern

Three Considerations for Planning Data Visualisations

During the first week of DS7, Caroline Beavon [http://carolinebeavon.com/]came in to teach us all about info-graphics

Mon 16 Oct 2017 | Charlie Daffern

Dynamic Titles

Here’s a quick tip on adding dynamic fields to your titles. This example is based on a name filter for different gymnasts. By double-clicking on the title to open the editing window, you can then use the ‘Insert’ option in the top right-hand corner to add dynamic fields to the title. Simple

Sun 08 Oct 2017 | Charlie Daffern

NFL Arrests: Application Viz Re-Vizited

Our project during the first week of DS7 was a classic: to makeover one of our application visualisations. I chose to revisit the data set I used for my interview viz, on NFL arrests. The Original [https://public.tableau.com/profile/charlie

Tue 03 Oct 2017 | Charlie Daffern

Hierarchies and Creating Geographical Roles

Hey everybody! I’m Charlie, one of the new recruits with DS7. I’ve come here fresh from studying for my masters – I was researching the application of remote sensing to high latitude vegetation in Russia, based at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge