Robert Headington

After completing his master’s in mathematics in 2014, Robert found how much he loved working with data while working for an audit company that specialised in finding exceptions and missed funding for clients. This gave him a desire to build a career in data analysis and when he came across Tableau, Robert became hooked on using visualisations to display insights from data. After playing around with tableau and meeting people involved in the data school, Robert knew that it was the perfect place for any inspiring tableau user to start their career.

Blog Posts

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Wed 22 May 2019 | Robert Headington
Tiny tableau tip: how to copy formatting between worksheets
Sometimes you can have multiple similar sheets in a dashboard that need to be formatted in the same way. However, once you have put these into the dashboard, the formatting may not work due to a smaller size or other reasons
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Thu 16 May 2019 | Robert Headington
Tiny tableau tip: how to display negative numbers as positives
Sometimes it can be useful to show negative numbers as positives. For example, during a makeover monday collaboration with equal measures [https://www.equalmeasures2030.org/] back in 2018 wk 39, I created this: link [https://public.tableau
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Tue 14 May 2019 | Robert Headington
Tiny tableau tip: how to see all your sheets in one view
I’ve been using tableau for many months now. However, every once in a while, I come across something really simple that I didn’t know existed which can help make using Tableau quicker and more user friendly. The ‘filmstrip’ and ‘screen sorter’ are one of these things
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Wed 01 May 2019 | Robert Headington
Dashboard week? day 3: Playing with a new tool
So our dashboard week is a little weird as it’s not on a single week but taking part whenever we can due to the amount of bank holiday’s we have during our 4 months training. Today we were looking at baby name data using a tool that none of us had ever used before: Flourish
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Thu 25 Apr 2019 | Robert Headington
Dashboard week day 2 - getting (more) hyped for endgame
So for today, we were asked to look at some marvel comic data. As I’m a fan of the MCU, I was looking forward to seeing what the data had. After looking for a while, I thought it would be interesting to get a kind of ‘top trumps’ view of each avengers (and friends)
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Tue 23 Apr 2019 | Robert Headington
Dashboard week day 1 - lots of macro practice
So a couple of things before I start 1. I have the flu and went home at lunch time today as it doesn’t feel great. Therefore I feel like my brain has been working at 60% capacity (getting my excuses out there)
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Wed 20 Mar 2019 | Robert Headington
How to download multiple files using Alteryx
Have you ever gone to a website which has many files that you download and spent ages downloading these files one-by-one? With Alteryx, you can download all of these files saving lots of time. 1 Create a text file and enter (or paste) the web address that you wish to download files from
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Sun 17 Mar 2019 | Robert Headington
Using Regex to find key information from a free input text field
On Tuesday, we learnt what Regex is and how we can use this in Tableau, Tableau Prep and Alteryx. So when I saw that Regex could be used to help solve this week’s Preppin data challenge [https://preppindata.blogspot
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Mon 11 Mar 2019 | Robert Headington
Small tips to reduce changes in Tableau Prep
While completing this week’s Preppin data challenge, I noticed a couple of small things that would reduce the number of changes listed in Tableau prep
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Sun 03 Mar 2019 | Robert Headington
Alteryx macro tip - Making dynamic drop downs using the input's fields
For our 4th week Friday project, we were asked to create as many macros based on tableau table calculations as possible in 3 hours. While completing my first macro (rank unique), I wanted to have an option to allow the user to be able to choose the field that they wanted to rank
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Wed 27 Feb 2019 | Robert Headington
Tableau server permissions part 2 – Overlapping and Default permissions
In part one [https://www.thedataschool.co.uk/robert-headington/tableaus-server-permissions-part-1-assigning-permissions/] , we looked at how you can assign permissions to groups and users
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Tue 26 Feb 2019 | Robert Headington
Tableau server permissions part 1 – Assigning permissions
Note: For details on what Sites, Projects, etc. are in Tableau server, see my blog post on here. [https://www.thedataschool.co
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Thu 21 Feb 2019 | Robert Headington
How is Tableau server organised?
Yesterday, we had our introduction to Tableau server and covered quite a lot in a day. One of the things we looked at in the beginning was how Tableau server was structured. The above shows an example of how things can be arranged in Tableau server
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Thu 14 Feb 2019 | Robert Headington
Combined axis vs dual axis.
[et_pb_section admin_label=”section”] [et_pb_row admin_label=”row”] [et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_text admin_label=”Text”]For most visualisations that I have created, if I have wanted to add in other measures into the view, I have generally used a dual axis to do this
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Tue 12 Feb 2019 | Robert Headington
A Tableau Tip for Tuesday – How to create custom regions
Sometimes it’s learning small things that make using Tableau so much easier or give you a new world of viz possibilities. Today we learnt a few, with my favourite being how to create your own custom regions from fields with no geographic value
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Wed 06 Feb 2019 | Robert Headington
What I hope to get out of the data school
After starting the data school on Monday and gaining a better understanding of what we will learn and develop, Andy [https://www.thedataschool.co.uk/blog/andy-kriebel/] suggested that you could do a blog post based on what you want to achieve from the experience
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