Nils Macher

Nils Macher

Via Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCS) Nils discovered the world of data analysis. Especially analysing the effects of anti-poverty strategies and policies fascinates him since he has worked in underprivileged communities in South Africa. He is a fan of Tableau because it helps him to tell compelling stories which raise awareness for social issues. His educational background is in Business Administration (MSc). Before joining the Data School, he worked as project management consultant in Germany.

Nils loves travelling and getting outside his comfort zone during his journeys. He plays squash, works on improving his photography skills and has a passion for cooking.

Blog Posts

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Fri 17 Aug 2018 | Nils Macher
Dashboard Week: Day 5 - Public Restrooms in Vancouver
Dashboard week came to an end with a data set about restrooms in Vancouver, Canada. The data was already structured in a Tableau friendly format, so no data preparation was required. Hence, I did not create an Alteryx workflow for today’s exercise
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Thu 16 Aug 2018 | Nils Macher
Dashboard Week: Day 4 - MLB Baseball League
Today was another sports data set today. After having already analysed the London Prudential Race cycling data, we changed sports and dived deep into the world of baseball.Retrosheets [https://www.retrosheet.org/gamelogs/index.html] has data about the MLB available going so far back as of 1871
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Wed 15 Aug 2018 | Nils Macher
Dashboard Week: Day 3 - Food Hygiene Rating in London
When you are going out in London, the Food Standards Agency makes sure you do not get food poising. It visits business which handle food and gives them a rating from 0 to 5 with 5 being the highest value
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Tue 14 Aug 2018 | Nils Macher
Dashboard Week: Day 2 - How Americans Spend Their Time
Today’s data set took us deep into the life of Americans. The American Bureau of Labor  Statistics publishes data about how American spent their daily time. By the minute, the days are broken down into major categories e.g. Household Activities or Work & Work-related activities
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Mon 13 Aug 2018 | Nils Macher
Dashboard Week: Day 1 - Prudential Ride London
Day 1 one dashboard week started off with a sporty exercise. Our task was to scrap the web page of the Prudential Ride London Results homepage: https://results.prudentialridelondon.co
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Sun 22 Jul 2018 | Nils Macher
Tableau Tip: Sets and combined Sets part II
In the first part of the parameter and sets Series I explained how these tools can help us to highlight members of a data set based on one criteria (revenue of companies)
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Tue 10 Jul 2018 | Nils Macher
Tableau Tip: Sets, Combined Sets and Parameters Part I
Sets enable you to visualize groups which match one or more criteria. They are even more powerful in combination with parameters which allow you to dynamically change the criteria for the sets
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Tue 26 Jun 2018 | Nils Macher
Data Preparation in Alteryx - From Excel Nightmare to Clean Data
You will often get into a position in which you will have to spend some time on cleaning the provided data before you can perform actual analysis on it. Take the following example: The date in the first row of the first column is quite common for an excel-sheet
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Thu 21 Jun 2018 | Nils Macher
Quick Tip - The last() function should be the first thing on your mind!
The last() function can be very helpful when you want to highlight a single data point of your data series. May it be the last, second last or even the first point of the series
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Thu 21 Jun 2018 | Nils Macher
Quick Tip - Avoid neck pain by making your y-axis title horizontal
You can save your audience some head leaning if you make your y-axis title horizontal instead of vertical. By default, the y-axis title is vertical in Tableau and it is not possible to change the alignment to horizontal. But with a little trick, you can change that
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Wed 20 Jun 2018 | Nils Macher
Quick Tip - Creating marginal histograms in Tableau
Marginal histograms are excellent for displaying your data on multiple aggregated levels in one view. Consider the following case. You have sales data and want tofind out which weekday, which month and which combination of weekday and month are the strongest
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Tue 19 Jun 2018 | Nils Macher
Quick Tip - Using cycle plots for date comparisons
Cycle plots are great for comparing date values over time. Take this chart for example: If we wanted to compare how each month performed in terms of sales over the last 4 years, this would be  difficult to do with this kind of line chart
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Tue 19 Jun 2018 | Nils Macher
Quick Tip - How to create extra space between your bars
Have you ever had the issue that you want to create extra space between bars which belong to a different category? Take this view for example: It is really difficult to see which bars belong to which region. The last row for each segmentis really close to the first row of the following segment
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Sun 17 Jun 2018 | Nils Macher
Friday Project - Supplement application viz with additional data
Each Friday, our coaches ask to present a project which relatesto the content we have learned over the period of the week. This week, our task was to supplement our application visualization with additional data
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Fri 15 Jun 2018 | Nils Macher
New in London - Attended the talk of Alberto Cairo
One of the big advantages of moving to London is the huge numbers of amazing speakers who make their appearance in the city. So during my first week in London, I already had the opportunity to attend the talk of Alberto Cairo, the author of the very well appraised book the truthful art
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