Emily Dowling

After graduating with a BA in Ancient History, Emily made the natural(!) transition into Business Consultancy, working with a number of Acute and Mental Health NHS Trusts delivering lean transformation programmes. This is where her interest in data analysis to understand organisational performance and capability developed. After a number of years battling with Excel attempting to communicate creative, interesting yet simple data stories Emily discovered Tableau and hasn’t looked back since.

In her spare time, Emily enjoys baking and cooking, playing tennis, and reading, and uses any opportunity and excuse to visit new countries around the world.

Blog Posts

Fri 02 Sep 2016 | Emily Dowling

How to Calculate a Linear Regression Line in Tableau

What is Linear Regression? Linear regression is a way of demonstrating a relationship between a dependent variable (y) and one or more explanatory variables (x). For example, on a scatterplot, linear regression finds the best fitting straight line through the data points

Mon 08 Aug 2016 | Emily Dowling

Quick Table Calcs: How to Calculate Percent of Total in Tableau

The quick table calculations in Tableau are really handy for doing fast analysis without having to do all the maths yourself. Percent of Total is one of the quick table calculations and enables you to find the percent distribution of a measure, broken down by a dimension

Fri 05 Aug 2016 | Emily Dowling

How to calculate a correlation coefficient in Tableau

What is a correlation coefficient? A correlation coefficient is a value that quantifies the relationship of two or more variables. In linear correlation the coefficient quantifies the strength and direction of the correlation between the variables

Tue 02 Aug 2016 | Emily Dowling

How to calculate Z-Scores in Tableau

What is a Z-Score? In statistics, the z-score is the relationship of a data point to the mean of a group of data points. Z-Scores are measured by the number of standard deviations from the mean

Thu 07 Jul 2016 | Emily Dowling

Cleaning up Date Data in Alteryx

One of the most common tasks I’ve found so far (with my limited use of Alteryx) is cleaning up Date data. The majority of times Date data comes into Alteryx as a String and in many different formats, depending on the personal preference of the person who has created the original file

Wed 06 Jul 2016 | Emily Dowling

Using a Multi-Row Formula in Alteryx

This week at Data School we are continuing our Alteryx training, and as part of this we have been working through Alteryx’s Weekly Challenges (you can find them here [http://community.alteryx.com/t5/forums/searchpage/tab/message?q=weekly])

Wed 06 Jul 2016 | Emily Dowling

Alteryx Quick Tip – Browse Shortcut

Everyone loves a keyboard shortcut, so here’s a handy Alteryx one. If you want to check what your data looks like along your workflow, click on any tool, or select a number of tools… … and press Ctrl + Shift + B and a Browse tool will be added to the output(s) of each tool

Mon 04 Jul 2016 | Emily Dowling

Wireless Connections in Alteryx

Sometimes with Alteryx Workflows you end up with a lot of tools and a lot of connections criss-crossing across the canvas which can look chaotic and confusing

Tue 21 Jun 2016 | Emily Dowling

Tableau Tip Tuesday - Using URL Actions in Dashboards

If you are using a URL action to display a webpage within your dashboard, a really good trick is to add an ‘m’ into your URL link. This means that the page will be displayed in a mobile view and will look much cleaner on your dashboard.

Tue 14 Jun 2016 | Emily Dowling

Tableau Tip Tuesday - Using Transparency in Scatterplots

Sometimes when you create a scatterplot with a large number of data points, it becomes hard to differentiate between individual points as they begin to merge together. A useful tip is to increase the transparency of the colour of the data points so that they can be distinguished more easily

Mon 13 Jun 2016 | Emily Dowling

Makeover Monday live at Tableau Conference

Tableau Conference is on tour this week in London and Andy Kriebel & Andy Cotgreave hosted #MakeoverMonday live and streamed it via Periscope. So, back at the Dataschool office we joined in the challenge – to create a viz in under an hour

Wed 08 Jun 2016 | Emily Dowling

Using Custom Shapes to Filter in Tableau

Using icons or pictures as filters or to navigate in Tableau can be a really easy way of making dashboards more visual and easy to use. And it’s very simple to do. Step 1: Select the Field to use as a Filter In my example I was using a dataset on Animal Rescues by the London Fire Brigade

Wed 08 Jun 2016 | Emily Dowling

Using Calculated Fields to Categorise your Data

For our client project last week, we had a dataset which included the turnover and employment size for a large number of individual companies

Tue 07 Jun 2016 | Emily Dowling

Learning to use Alteryx

Week 3 at Data School we were thrown head first into the world of Alteryx. It was probably the toughest week so far for me, just trying to get my head around: 1. The vast extent of what Alteryx can do, and 2. Understanding how to just create the simplest workflow