Manuela Marolla

With a background in development studies and a passion for languages, research, and analysis, Manuela found in the Data School the perfect match to get her analytical and visual design skills to the next level.

In the past 2 years, she’s built a special bond with India.

First, she worked as an IDEX fellow at Ashoka – Innovators for the Public in Bangalore, surrounded by social entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs, start-up accelerators, and creative innovators under 20.

She then joined a small team and a brand-new NGO based in Delhi. The pilot project saw her working with government school teachers and the local Education department to improve learning levels with a special focus on teachers’ engagement.

After collecting data on the ground, it was time to turn the results into an easy-to-use dashboard for different audiences. That’s how she explored solutions online and discovered Tableau. The Data School blog gave her guidance and useful tips. Applying for the Data School was an easy choice: it was the best opportunity to learn from the best and dive deep into data analysis and visual design.

Her hope for the future is to combine these skills with her big interests: research, reporting, M&EL, civic technologies, and all that makes complex social issues accessible and digestible to citizens, especially in this complex time.

Volunteering has been and still is a big part of her life, from first aid to mental health to online volunteering in media monitoring and civic tech.

She’s an avid reader as well as a podcast and language lover. Hopefully, she will find the time here in London to resume studying languages and learning new ones.

Blog Posts

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Wed 02 Jan 2019 | Manuela Marolla
LODs vs Table Calcs: How to compare the profits of all the Sub-categories to that of the selected one?
In this example, we are going to look at two different ways to get the same result in Tableau. Follow along using Tableau’s Superstore dataset. Look at the screenshot above. It’s the final result that we want to achieve
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Tue 01 Jan 2019 | Manuela Marolla
Alteryx tips: Joins, wrong choice of tools, and how to prevent costly mistakes
There is one thing I am really scared of:joins. Whenever we have a weekly project (and even during Dashboard Week), I am always very careful when joining multiple files together. There are even vizzes on Tableau Public to guide you on how the different types of joins work
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Tue 01 Jan 2019 | Manuela Marolla
Web Scraping 101: A guided example in Alteryx - Part 1
Which tools do you need? The web offers several tools that you can use. However, here we are going to use Alteryx. You don’t have Alteryx and would like to try it? Install the trial version here [https://pages.alteryx.com/trial-designer.html]
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Tue 01 Jan 2019 | Manuela Marolla
Web Scraping 101: A short introduction
What is web-scraping? Web-scraping is the automated collection of information from webpages. The authors of “Automated Collection with R. A Practical Guide to Webscraping and Text Mining” [https://books.google
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Thu 20 Dec 2018 | Manuela Marolla
Dashboard Week ~ Day 4! Time to talk about Seattle bike...counters!
Dashboard Week, Day 4. Iloved this one! Here’s Andy’s blog post [https://www.thedataschool.co.uk/andy-kriebel/ds11-dashboard-week-day-4/]. Bikes, bikes, so many bikes Let me start by saying this: as soon as I arrived in London, thefirst thing I boughtwas abike
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Wed 19 Dec 2018 | Manuela Marolla
Dashboard Week ~ Day 3: Want to learn Power BI?
Day 3 of Dashboard Week is almost over! And we’ve finally discovered what Andy had meant by “Wednesday is going to be interesting”. Today is the day of…Microsoft Power BI! Do you know all Microsoft products? If you have a look at Microsoft’s main page [https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/sitemap
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Tue 18 Dec 2018 | Manuela Marolla
Dashboard Week ~ Day 2: NOPD videos from body-worn cameras
New day. New challenge. Here’s Andy’s blog post [https://www.thedataschool.co.uk/andy-kriebel/ds11-dashboard-week-day-2/]. Today we are looking at a dataset on NOPD and the use of body-worn cameras
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Mon 17 Dec 2018 | Manuela Marolla
Dashboard Week ~ Day 1: 1 hour, 1 day, and 253M rows about a snowy NYC
Monday. December 17, 2018. DS11. It’s Dashboard Week! Honestly, I started the day full of great promises. Yesterday, I spent the whole evening going through DS10’s Dashboard Week blog posts and collecting design ideas. I was ready to start
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Thu 29 Nov 2018 | Manuela Marolla
Alteryx Connect: What is it? And how to connect it to Alteryx Designer?
Server Week This week has been theServer Weekfor DS11. After digging into what Tableau server is and how it works (Friday challenge is coming up with PostGreSQL), Ben Moss [https://www.thedataschool.co
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Wed 07 Nov 2018 | Manuela Marolla
Measure Names and Measure Values: What are they?
A simple word to describe them isplaceholders. Measure Names and Measure Values are placeholders that tryto squeeze multiple things in the same place. Look at this chart: Let’s say I want to showboth SUM(Sales) and SUM(Profit)
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Wed 07 Nov 2018 | Manuela Marolla
Tableau Extracts: What are their Pros and Cons?
What is an extract? Maleeha today came up with the right word for it: A snapshot. Basically, a Tableau extract allows you to create a copy your dataset or subsets of data and save them. You may also want to reduce the total amount of data by using filters
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Wed 07 Nov 2018 | Manuela Marolla
How to create a Twitter Analysis Macro in Alteryx – Part 1
In week 3, we had a full day dedicated to Macros with Peter Gamble-Beresford [https://www.theinformationlab.co.uk/team/#8900]. As usual, I tried to follow and take loads of notes and screenshots at the same time. I needed a few hours by myself to review them all again
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Tue 06 Nov 2018 | Manuela Marolla
Tableau Prep 101: Data scaffolding — How many patients at the hospital today?
Want to know more about Tableau Prep? Here are a few basic things I learned:Tableau Prep 101: Prep vs Alteryx Tools + What it can/can’t do [https://www.thedataschool.co.uk/manuela-marolla/tableau-prep-101-prep-vs-alteryx-tools-what-can-do/] Let’s say you manage a hospital
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Tue 06 Nov 2018 | Manuela Marolla
Tableau Prep 101: Prep vs Alteryx Tools + What it can/can't do
Emily [https://www.thedataschool.co.uk/blog/emily-chen/]came in last week to teach us Tableau Prep . Although the topic was not the most exciting one, I loved her teaching style
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Thu 25 Oct 2018 | Manuela Marolla
Dealing with datasets on Alteryx . . . in Arabic!
At the end of week 1, at presentation time, DS10 presented an interesting case. It was very much in line with the kind of research and non-profit work that I’m interested in: Operation Fistula. DS10 shared with us how they came across a few hitches. One of them was language related
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Thu 25 Oct 2018 | Manuela Marolla
How to Extract Embedded Hyperlinks with Alteryx
In week 1, Carl had fun asking us about hobbies. We naively answered him. A few hours later, the afternoon started with Carl coupling us and assigning us five different messy datasets created by carefully putting stuff from the internet on a spreadsheet to make our lives difficult
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Tue 16 Oct 2018 | Manuela Marolla
Alteryx, Great Talks, and Week 1 - Speedy - Timeline
After an intense—and startling—first week at the Data School, I had some time during the weekend to go through all my notes about our first five days of training
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