Anna Noble

After doing BA in Economics Anna took a break from the world of data for 4 years, working odd jobs in several different continents and blogging about her experiences. She then returned to the UK to do a Masters in Online Journalism at Birmingham City University. During the course she discovered data visualisations was a great way to merge her storytelling and data skills. After attending the Tableau Zen Master Tour, the Data School was the logical next step.

Blog Posts

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Sun 04 Mar 2018 | Anna Noble
Week 2 Roundup: Tableau tips, James Eiloart and viz makeovers
Tableau’s James Eiloart with DS8 In Week 2, Andy Kriebel gave DS8 a large dose of Tableau training.  For their Friday presentations, the group used the data they had prepared for the previous week’s Alteryx project to help them re-viz and add context to their application Tableau dashboard
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Thu 01 Mar 2018 | Anna Noble
Week 1 roundup: Alteryx and an intro to Tableau Server
A new group of eight people entering the Data School means eight new bloggers to welcome to the internet. To make it easy for you to follow their journey, we’ll be posting a weekly roundup of the teams’ blog posts as they go through The Information Lab’s four-month training program
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Tue 27 Feb 2018 | Anna Noble
3 Reasons you should follow The Data School blogs
DS8 design infographics with Caroline Beavon [https://carolinebeavon.com/] DS8, the 8th group of 8 people started their training at The Data School two weeks ago. I’ve been helping them get acquainted with the world of blogging and these guys are creating some great content
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Mon 06 Feb 2017 | Anna Noble
Workout Wednesday week 5: LoD defeat but I figured out the legend!
Andy’s Workout Wednesday [http://www.vizwiz.com/2017/02/ww-distributions.html] looking at the distribution of NFL players performances between 2006 and 2016 took me a seriously long time to figure out. Here’s a quick explanation of what I found tough and why
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Sat 07 Jan 2017 | Anna Noble
If I could go back to the start...
Time for one last reflective blog, looking at what I would do differently if time travel was possible and I could restart the Data School.  I think I’d look to adopt the things I’ve already talked about from the beginning, asking questions [https://www.thedataschool.co
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Thu 29 Dec 2016 | Anna Noble
Asking questions to succeed at the Data School
After almost 3 months, I’ve come to the conclusion that asking lots of questions is one of the best ways tosurvive succeed in the Data School. Just ask It’s an incredibly simple thing to do. But I know sometimes asking for help can feel difficult thanks to this annoying thing called pride
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Thu 29 Dec 2016 | Anna Noble
Data School challenges logic, learning and self confidence
Coming from a journalism background, adapting to the world of data analysis has come with lots of challenges. The written word is my favourite way to communicate, to tell stories.  But in the Data School storytelling happens visually and verbally
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Thu 01 Dec 2016 | Anna Noble
Tableau Server: The user interface, who can see what?
Tableau server’s user interface allows the administrator to decide who has access to which data. And whether a person has the ability to publish visualisations in workbooks or publish data sources
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Tue 29 Nov 2016 | Anna Noble
Create a lollipop style control chart (part2): Using size and colour to show variation
Here’s how used calculated fields in my lollipop control chart to highlight the variation in height and wingspan. To catch up on how I built the chart using data for the Data School Iron Viz competition check out part 1 [https://www.thedataschool.co
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Mon 28 Nov 2016 | Anna Noble
Create a lollipop style control chart (part1): 2 measure lollipops
Carl Allchin [https://twitter.com/Datajedininja] introduced DS4 to control charts last week [https://www.thedataschool.co.uk/megan-hunt/make-simple-control-chart/]. And I got inspired to take the idea of highlighting those that are on target vs outliers into my Data School Ironviz [https://www
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Mon 28 Nov 2016 | Anna Noble
Grabbing a beer with Import.io data extractor
I recently used Import.io [https://www.import.io/] to scrape some data on US craft beer brewers [https://www.brewersassociation.org/statistics/by-state/].  It’s a great tool for scraping data without having to know a single bit of code, so I thought I’d share it with you guys
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Fri 25 Nov 2016 | Anna Noble
#DJUK16: Blue plaque data viz asks where are the women?
At the  Data Journalism UK conference, Chris Love and I, showed journalists how Tableau can make data visualisation easy. Here’s a quick recap of the data we used and the demo viz Chris created.  Then I’ll share what did with the data
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Thu 24 Nov 2016 | Anna Noble
Why and when to use table calculations in Tableau
In Tableau you can manipulate, edit, add context, and create new fields in your data using calculated fields. All without having to go back and edit your original database
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Sun 06 Nov 2016 | Anna Noble
Anna and Alteryx. A rocky relationship.
Alteryx & I. Currently at phase 3. Working towards 4. I love Alteryx At the beginning of Alteryx week [https://www.thedataschool.co
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Fri 28 Oct 2016 | Anna Noble
3 Tips to make spatial data in Alteryx easy(er)
New kinds of data brings a whole new set of tools and tips into the Alteryx work space.  And new trainers for those of us at the Data School. (Thanks goes to Phil [https://twitter.com/Phil_L57] and Andre [https://twitter
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Fri 28 Oct 2016 | Anna Noble
Spacing out with Poly-Build in Alteryx
is a spatial data tool which allows you to join a set of points on a map and create a polygon. Why is it useful? If you have a set of longitude and latitude coordinates you can mark out an area of say  x miles around a certain point
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Wed 26 Oct 2016 | Anna Noble
Alteryx: It all starts with Input Data
Every workflow needs a data source.  Enter the Input Data tool – arguably the most important tool in Alteryx! Access to different data sources The Input Data tool allows you to load in a range of data files, including Excel, CSV, XML & JSON
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Tue 25 Oct 2016 | Anna Noble
5 tips to make creating a workflow in Alteryx easy(er)
Getting to grips with Alteryx this week at the Data School is making my head hurt.  But here’s some tips I picked up form Chris Love [https://twitter.com/ChrisLuv] to make life easy when you’re using Alteryx for the first time. 1
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Sun 16 Oct 2016 | Anna Noble
3 things I learned from the first week of Data School
There’s been a lot of information thrown at us in the first week of the Data School: Sorting, filtering, table calculations, a whole bunch of different types of charts and more
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Wed 12 Oct 2016 | Anna Noble
Makeover Monday: Temperatures are rising
Day 2 at the Data School,it was time for a #MakeoverMonday [http://www.makeovermonday.co.uk/]. Ed Hawkins‘ [https://twitter.com/ed_hawkins] visualisation of average global temperatures was our first chance to remake a viz and put our new Tableau knowledge to the test
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