Emily Chen

Emily Chen

As a bonafide biz nerd, Emily loves telling stories with data. Feeling frustrated with spreadsheets, Tableau and Alteryx unlocked creativity and freedom for her analysis.

She’s currently learning the art of data visualization and eager to apply these skills in banking and B2C strategy.

Outside of work, you will find her perusing one of London’s many museums or on the search for the city’s best flat white. Follow Emily’s journey through The Data School on Twitter!

Blog Posts

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Mon 02 Nov 2015 | Emily Chen
My experience with PowerBI
[https://www.thedataschool.co.uk/content/images/wordpress/2015/11/power-BI-image1.jpg] This week at The Data School, we’re looking at Power BI and Qliksense to learn more about other offerings in the BI market
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Sun 04 Oct 2015 | Emily Chen
Understanding student dropouts through Sankey Charts
Note to readers: I’ve been asked to change a couple of visuals here so it might look a bit different from the previous version. I’ve replicated the method below with a dataset on student results from Harvard’s most popular online class – Introduction to Computer Science and Programming
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Thu 01 Oct 2015 | Emily Chen
2 Things I Learned from the Tableau Fundamentals Class
Today I played teaching assistant to Emma Whyte [https://twitter.com/emmawhyte] ‘s Tableau Fundamentals Class with Schroders. Really fantastic to meet not only traders, but marketing, HR and finance teams really keen to utlize Tableau to solve their business questions
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Mon 21 Sep 2015 | Emily Chen
Creating a Dynamic Sales View based on Different Date Types
When I worked in retail, I found 2 views to be pretty important: how are we doing this month compared to this month last year , and how we are “rolling up” for the year (year to date performance)
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Wed 02 Sep 2015 | Emily Chen
Tableau Tip: How to Create a Dynamic Time View
I’ve created a dynamic time parameter so that the x-axis starts at a different date based on the number of days from today. Any business collecting sales for delivery into the future (any business that involves bookings or shipping) would find this incredibly valuable
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Tue 01 Sep 2015 | Emily Chen
Review - Data Points by Nathan Yau
I read Data Points by Nathan Yau [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Data-Points-Visualization-Something-Nathan/dp/B00DO97JVC/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1441110167&sr=8-2&keywords=data+points+nathan+yau] this weekend – fantastic read. All you really need to know is that I couldn’t put the book down
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Mon 31 Aug 2015 | Emily Chen
Does Home Court Advantage Exist In the Olympics?
With a dataset of just number of Olympic medals, host country and year, we were asked to visualize something. Or rather anything
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Mon 31 Aug 2015 | Emily Chen
100 Days Post Sandy Hook - Visualizing a Difficult Policy to Change
This week we also revisualized this fantastic piece by the Huffington Post [http://data.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/gun-deaths]. So once you see it, you’ll notice that it’s a difficult visualization to top
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Sun 30 Aug 2015 | Emily Chen
Context in Data Visualization through Children Affected by HIV Deaths Dataset
This was probably the saddest dataset [http://mdgs.un.org/unsd/mdg/Metadata.aspx] I’ve worked with so far. The staggering numbers of children impacted by AIDS really made a toll on me. I picked the topic because I associate the UN with Stephen Lewis [https://en.wikipedia
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Sat 29 Aug 2015 | Emily Chen
Fast Viz Friday with the Most Unstable US Real Estate Markets
Friday was a doozy. It’s been a week where the team has been building a dashboard a day. While not hard if we were building a series of KPI dashboards, each day we’re looking at different data sets and effectively tapping into different levels of creativity
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Wed 26 Aug 2015 | Emily Chen
22 Charts with 2 Numbers and Color
Yesterday I built a dashboard with 2 numbers. It’s a fantastic mental exercise in testing your understanding on how to build charts, even the nonsensical ones (pie charts anyone?). I was able to build around 22 charts (not bad for 2 numbers!)
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Tue 25 Aug 2015 | Emily Chen
Postcards to Jeffery Shaffer
[https://www.thedataschool.co.uk/content/images/wordpress/2015/08/Emily-Working.jpg] Today we were writing postcards to Jeffery Shaffer as part of Andy and Jeffery’s Dear Data Two [http://www.dear-data-two.com/] project. It’s inspired by the original Dear Data [http://www.dear-data
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Fri 21 Aug 2015 | Emily Chen
Tableau Tip: Importing Custom Colour Palettes
Importing custom color palettes is one simple way to completely transform the dashboard’s look and feel. It never ceases to amaze me what a difference formatting makes! I’m currently working on my Dota 2 dashboard so I’ll walk through this example
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Thu 20 Aug 2015 | Emily Chen
Tableau Tip: How to Build a Unit Chart without Shapes
I recently saw this viz and was immediately overtaken with a Tableau “Magic Moment”. Here’s the image but its a must see [https://public.tableau
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Wed 19 Aug 2015 | Emily Chen
Tableau Tip: How to Hack Color and Shape Legends
Coach Andy [https://twitter.com/VizWizBI] recently showed me how to change up displaying legends with unicode characters. It’s super simple and provides a cleaner look on a dashboard
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Tue 18 Aug 2015 | Emily Chen
Tableau Tip: Creating a Stream Graph with Dynamic Dimensions
Stream graphs are wonderful for telling stories because they convey time in a very dynamic way. This famous New York Times [http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/02/23/movies/20080223_REVENUE_GRAPHIC
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Tue 18 Aug 2015 | Emily Chen
Tableau Tip: Building KPI Dashboards with Shapes
One of the coolest things to do with dashboards is dynamic shapes for good news/challenges. This is a unique visual cue that I utilized for the Surrey Council Project [https://public.tableau.com/profile/emily2933#!/vizhome/SurreyCouncilResidentsSurvey-KPIDashboard/KPIDashboard]
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Thu 06 Aug 2015 | Emily Chen
Market Sizing Prescription Drugs in the UK – Part 2 – How to Upload Data into an Exasol Database
This is a continuation ofmy previous post on market sizing prescription drugs in the UK [https://www.thedataschool.co.uk/emily-chen/market-sizing-prescription-drugs-in-the-uk-part-1-scraping-the-data/]
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Wed 05 Aug 2015 | Emily Chen
Market Sizing Prescription Drugs in the UK - Part 1 - Scraping the Data
In this week’s project, I’m interested to know how Pharmaceutical companies evaluate market sizes. The viz is finally uploaded [https://public.tableau
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Wed 22 Jul 2015 | Emily Chen
Spatial Data - Part I - Data Parsing in Alteryx
While working on my spatial project, I found a useful technique for data parsing a field with 2 different formats (commonly seen in reports). Side note: You’ll notice that my files are labelled “Brittany’s Activity Data”
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Sat 11 Jul 2015 | Emily Chen
6 Ways to Make the Most of Your First Tableau Conference
Data nerds rejoice! Here are the top tips to make the most of your first Tableau Conference. 1. Read Blue things and Green things [http://www.theinformationlab.co.uk/2011/09/23/blue-things-and-green-things/]by The Information Lab Before attending, get your mind to start “Thinking Tableau”
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Sun 28 Jun 2015 | Emily Chen
Week 1: Shoot for the moon
I’ve come to The Information Lab with zero expectations. I knew I was going to learn Tableau & Alteryx from the brightest in the biz but that’s about it. To sum up, the first week was challenging and overwhelming but also liberating and creative
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