Vivian Ng

As a member of The Data School New York's third cohort, Vivian recently completed two placements at Vanguard as a Tableau consultant. During her placements, she produced new and revamped existing dashboards that visualize key efficiency metrics to improve time to insight and optimize performance. As the Tableau expert for her client, she also troubleshooted issues with data sources and calculations, and provided guidance on best practices for data visualization, data source structure, and dashboard performance. She also created comprehensive documentation and focused training sessions on future dashboard maintenance. All of the dashboards she worked on culminated into a cohesive portfolio of consistently clear visualizations and a smooth user experience that are consumed by senior leadership and analysts alike, enabling senior leaders to glean actionable insights and formulate data-backed plans for the department's future.

Vivian's strengths lie in implementing data visualization best practices to present information clearly and effectively, always with the audience in mind. Paying close attention to detail when gathering requirements, she is quick to seek clarification before getting to work and always receptive to feedback.

Vivian is a lover of puns first and a data analyst second, with a B.A. in Psychology; her academic background makes her particularly interested in the intersection between cognition and visualization best practices. Her journey to data analytics began when she built the Quality Assurance department from the ground up at her previous job—all while learning how to use Excel at the same time. As a lover of stories, she’s stoked to now tell them with data too, all while cultivating her skills in Tableau, Alteryx, and SQL. Her passions lie in cultural psychology, social justice, and of course, seeing the puntential in everything.

In her free time, she likes to crochet and watch low-stakes baking competitions on Netflix. In addition to providing technical documentation for clients, she also enjoys writing for her own data analytics blog (VNGLOOKUP on WordPress and Medium, in addition to The Data School website–now with a handy table of contents!).

Certifications

Blog Posts

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Wed 09 Oct 2024 | Vivian Ng
Can I Axis You a Question?
Can I axis you a question? How do you make an axis dynamic? We’re moving away from the Once More Unto the HIPAA Breach dashboard (HIPAA breach reviz) now, to other topics pertaining to other dashboards
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Wed 11 Sep 2024 | Vivian Ng
The (High)lights Are On, But Nobody’s Home
Today, I’ll be talking about how to highlight all your marks in a visualization (also known as removing unwanted highlighting or disabling Tableau’s default highlighting). Before I describe the process, let me explain what I mean by Tableau’s default highlighting
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Thu 29 Aug 2024 | Vivian Ng
A Plot to Learn
…a dot strip plot, that is! First off, what’s a dot strip plot? It’s similar to a scatterplot, but instead of two axes, there’s just one. Dot strip plots show the distribution of values with one dot representing one value, as well as outliers and gaps in the range
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Thu 08 Aug 2024 | Vivian Ng
At the Touch of a Button
Creating buttons in Tableau is a fasten-ating process! Let’s learn how! But before we do, let’s talk about why. Buttons don’t change anything regarding the interactivity of the visualization; rather, they replace the default drop-down menus when customizing your view
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Wed 24 Jul 2024 | Vivian Ng
What Do Outliers Even MEAN?
(cross-posted here) “average breach in 2015 affected 419,645 individuals a year” factoid actualy just statistical error. average breach in 2015 affected 126,085 individuals per year. Anthem Inc. Georg, who lives in cave & experienced a massive HIPAA breach affecting 78
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Sat 30 Sep 2023 | Vivian Ng
Nesting, Nesting, 1-2-3
Nested IF statements are when you have an IF statement inside an IF statement. I personally still find them a little difficult to understand, but they’re useful for when you only want to use one calculation
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Sat 30 Sep 2023 | Vivian Ng
Put on the Dot
To wrap up the first section (other than making the buttons) of my HIPAA breaches dashboard remake, we’re going to talk about how you can select a point on a line with a parameter action, like so: This line chart actually has a lone point dual axised with it
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Tue 26 Sep 2023 | Vivian Ng
This IS a Drill(-down), Part 2 – Parameter Action
Continuing where we left off from having created a parameter that allowed us to drill down to breach type, let’s go into the parameter action today! #4: Selecting a Breach Type 1
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Tue 26 Sep 2023 | Vivian Ng
This IS a Drill(-down), Part 1 – Parameter
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Thu 21 Sep 2023 | Vivian Ng
New Kid on the Doc(ument), Part 2 – Tableau
Continuing where we left off last time, let’s talk about documenting a Tableau workbook this week
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Thu 14 Sep 2023 | Vivian Ng
New Kid on the Doc(ument), Part 1 – Alteryx
Handoff vs
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Fri 01 Sep 2023 | Vivian Ng
Flunk-Cost Fallacy
I don’t really like talking about my successes, and I like talking about my failures even less, but as I just passed the Alteryx Advanced Certification Exam on my second try a week ago, I thought I’d blog about it while the memory is still fresh
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Thu 31 Aug 2023 | Vivian Ng
Dashboard Week, Day 1: Fix My Street (Glasgow)
Day 1 of Dashboard Week for me was a few months ago (May 30), but I had to leave early that day, so I didn’t get to complete that dashboard until now
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Wed 09 Aug 2023 | Vivian Ng
Back to the Drawing (Dash)board
If you’ve been following my blog, you’ll know that I’ve been writing about how I created my HIPAA breaches dashboard
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Tue 25 Jul 2023 | Vivian Ng
Battle of the BANs
(Originally posted on my blog here, on January 25, 2023
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Tue 25 Jul 2023 | Vivian Ng
Getting in Shape
(Originally posted on my own blog here, on January 18, 2023
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Tue 25 Jul 2023 | Vivian Ng
The Sharpest Tool(tip) in the Shed
(Originally posted on my own blog here, on January 11, 2023
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Wed 19 Jul 2023 | Vivian Ng
(Leg)end of the Line
Yes, the title of today’s blog was inspired by a song from one of the best movies ever (Cheetah Girls); no, I am not taking any questions on this subject at this time
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Wed 05 Jul 2023 | Vivian Ng
Teaching for the Stars
Something I’ve learned a lot about during training (and post-training as well) is how to teach. It’s a bit different from doing a presentation, though there is some overlap. I just did some teaching recently, so I decided to write about my experience
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Wed 21 Jun 2023 | Vivian Ng
Breaching Containment
DSNY4 just started training, and that got me thinking back to my application viz on HIPAA breaches, which I’ve been meaning to go back to, so that I can implement some things I learned during my own training
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Fri 02 Jun 2023 | Vivian Ng
Dashboard Week, Day 4: Red vs. Blue
Last day of Dashboard Week! Today, we were assigned the same dataset the incoming DSNY4 cohort analyzed for their final application viz: gift travel filings! I’d had the title in my mind for a while (Red vs
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Thu 01 Jun 2023 | Vivian Ng
Dashboard Week, Day 3: Quiz Goal
For the third day of Dashboard Week, we needed to scrape the Bundesliga website for 20 (or more) seasons’ worth of data. We also had to create an exploratory dashboard after cleaning up the data. There were three parts to my workflow: 1. Test Workflow (for scraping one season only) 2
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Wed 31 May 2023 | Vivian Ng
Dashboard Week, Day 2: Land of Owe-ppurtunity
Today’s the second day of Dashboard Week, and we analyzed National Survey of College Graduates 2021 data. I sought to learn more about college graduates and the median amount they borrowed to finance their undergraduate degrees, in relation to their mother or father’s level of education
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Thu 25 May 2023 | Vivian Ng
And… (Set) Action!
Welcome back! Today, I’m going to talk about section 3 of my HIPAA breaches dashboard, specifically how to make it so that when you click on a bar on the left, both that bar and the corresponding line on the right turn blue
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Fri 12 May 2023 | Vivian Ng
Recharted Territory
Hey, welcome back to Charted Territory, or rather, Recharted Territory!!! Yes, I’m still proud of the pun, can you tell? 😛 This entry is a continuation of last time’s, to finish explaining the process behind the chart swap
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Mon 08 May 2023 | Vivian Ng
Charted Territory
Note: I wrote this entry before learning how to create a measure switch, which is what I used instead when re-vizzing my application viz, so please be aware that while this blog is showing you how to do the chart switch, it’s not necessarily the best use case for it
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Fri 21 Apr 2023 | Vivian Ng
Interface Tools Q&A (Question & Action)
In this week’s training, we explored a whole new set of tools in Alteryx: the Interface Tools, which are black and white. The Interface Tools are used to build analytic apps (
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Tue 11 Apr 2023 | Vivian Ng
Plog Champ
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Tue 14 Mar 2023 | Vivian Ng
A Whole LOD-ta Love
[cross-posted here] When I first started working on my HIPAA breaches dashboard, I was interested in seeing how many individuals were affected by HIPAA breaches every year
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Thu 23 Feb 2023 | Vivian Ng
A (Measure) Switch (Parameter) in Time Saves Nine (Visualizations)
[on Parameters & Calculated Fields] I didn’t realize until I was building my DSNY application dashboard just how powerful calculated fields used in conjunction with parameters can be (e.g., chart swap section titled “Breaching for America”)
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Mon 13 Feb 2023 | Vivian Ng
Daft (Chart)junk
I discovered my love for data storytelling quite early in my journey to data analytics and am always pushing myself to figure out how best to make insights easy to understand
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Mon 13 Feb 2023 | Vivian Ng
Dash(board)ing Through the Snow
I originally posted this on my own blog (VNGLOOKUP) on December 28, 2022. At the time, I had just applied to the Data School New York’s third cohort and was going through the interview process when I started VNGLOOKUP on a whim
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