Kolsuma Aktar

Kolsuma graduated in BSc Economics and Management from King’s College London and has had previous internship experiences in marketing and analytics. During her degree, she enjoyed using econometrics software to gather interesting insights that help to test economic theories. Upon graduating, she was looking for an analytical role that allowed her to gain an expertise.

After coming across The Data School, Kolsuma realized it was the perfect combination of training and client placements that would be a great start to her career. While she enjoys creating visualisations, she’s also getting back into her childhood hobby of drawing through digital art.

Blog Posts

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Fri 24 May 2019 | Kolsuma Aktar
Leave a trail of breadcrumbs for your filters
> Updated method: > This method removes the need to use your filtering dimensions as attributes in the tooltip. After applying your dashboard filter actions, use the filter action once on the dashboard (e.g. click on a region to filter the other charts)
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Thu 23 May 2019 | Kolsuma Aktar
My Work Shadowing Experience
This is my last week of training! Absolutely insane how fast the last 4 months have gone by. I was given the opportunity to shadow a dataschooler (Steph) who’s on her third client placement so this blog post will be going through my experience and what I did to try and get the most out of it
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Mon 20 May 2019 | Kolsuma Aktar
Webinars - Learn what the dataschool learns
Some time ago DS13 taught the public Tableau and Alteryx at our Learn what the dataschool learns event. The following two weeks consisted of each DS13 member teaching their same sessions but in a 1 hour webinar
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Fri 17 May 2019 | Kolsuma Aktar
Use 'Replace References' when replacing data sources in Tableau
Have you ever updated or replaced your datasource in an existing Tableau workbook and all your calculations have broken due to renamed fields? I’m going to teach you how to solve this issue
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Tue 14 May 2019 | Kolsuma Aktar
Add custom colours in Tableau and Alteryx
Hi all! In this tutorial I will be showing you how to colour pick the screen and add custom colours in tableau and Alteryx. Tableau: In the ‘Edit Colors’ pop-up, double click on the colour legend next to one of the Data Items. Edit Colours Pop-upThis will open up the ‘Select Color pop-up’
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Wed 01 May 2019 | Kolsuma Aktar
Kolsuma’s Dashboard Week Diary – Day 3 Flourish
Since we missed some of the days in our dashboard week last week, we got a dashboard week challenge today. Sophie Sparkes (a core consultant at The Information Lab) gave us today’s challenge. We were to look at England and Wales baby name data but could only use Flourish [https://flourish
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Thu 25 Apr 2019 | Kolsuma Aktar
Kolsuma’s Dashboard Week Diary – Day 2 (INFINITY WAR SPOILERS)
As excited as I was with today’s challenge, I couldn’t be more disappointed in my results! Before we get into my experience of this challenge, here’s [https://www.thedataschool.co.uk/andy-kriebel/avengers/] some background
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Wed 24 Apr 2019 | Kolsuma Aktar
Alteryx Easter Eggs
Easter has just gone past so I’m a little late with the best easter eggs of all… Alteryx Easter eggs! With all the dashboard week blogs on here, I thought I’d throw in a fun little blog post for you. Here are a few hidden treats on Alteryx that I’ve found out about while at the dataschool
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Tue 23 Apr 2019 | Kolsuma Aktar
Kolsuma's Dashboard Week Diary - Day 1
Dashboard week is here! Today’s task can be found here [https://www.thedataschool.co.uk/andy-kriebel/nhs-trusts/] in Andy’s blog post. We were supposed to use the data.gov.uk website to webscrape expense data for 391 trusts (or CCG’s) that spanned over 20 pages
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Mon 22 Apr 2019 | Kolsuma Aktar
Part 2 - Creating string parameters with dynamic axis titles (on horizontal axis)
Hi all! During my first month at the dataschool we learned how to create parameters that allowed the user to switch between different measures on the the chart. I wrote a blog post which can be found here [https://www.thedataschool.co
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Mon 22 Apr 2019 | Kolsuma Aktar
Teaching week - Learn what the dataschool learns
Two weeks ago DS13 had their teaching week, where we teach one topic in either Alteryx or Tableau to the public for about 1 hour to 1.5 hours each. My topic was parameters and parameter actions for Tableau
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Sun 21 Apr 2019 | Kolsuma Aktar
Tiny Tableau Tip - Copy & Paste dashboards
At the dataschool, we have a different client project every week and the project manager creates a dashboard template with brand colours and a standard layout for everyone to use in their own dashboards
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Tue 02 Apr 2019 | Kolsuma Aktar
How to create Donut Charts on Tableau (part 2)
Here’s part 2 for how I created my Makeover Monday viz [https://public.tableau.com/profile/kolsuma.aktar#!/vizhome/Howmuchiseachgenerationspendingatrestaurants/Dashboard] last week. If you haven’t already checked out part 1, check it out here [https://www.thedataschool.co
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Wed 27 Mar 2019 | Kolsuma Aktar
How to create Donut Charts on Tableau (part 1)
Designed by @KolsumaAktar [https://twitter.com/KolsumaAktar] Donut image source [https://dumielauxepices.net/wallpaper-458318] Hi all! This week I decided to have a bit of fun with my visualisation for Makeover Monday and wanted to find a way to include images as a part of the charts themselves
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Tue 19 Mar 2019 | Kolsuma Aktar
Using Mapbox for custom map backgrounds in Tableau
Today at the Dataschool, Dan Farmer [http://@danfarmerTIL] taught us how to change the map background style on Tableau worksheets and I thought it was a great way to personalise map views so I’ll share it here for others. Go to https://www.mapbox
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Tue 12 Mar 2019 | Kolsuma Aktar
Our first client project was a success!
This is more of a diary entry about my experience of DS13’s first client project. Data Preparation: The challenge I was working on didn’t require much data prep so I decided to help prepare date for a different challenge to speed things along for the rest of the team
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Thu 28 Feb 2019 | Kolsuma Aktar
Creating string parameters with dynamic axis titles
In this tutorial I will be showing you how to create string parameters that allows users to choose between different fields
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Wed 27 Feb 2019 | Kolsuma Aktar
How to create Candlestick (or OHLC) charts for share prices
Last Friday at the dataschool, DS13 were tasked with convincing the audience to invest in particular shares using data visualisations (experts spend hours trying to do this so I’m not sure why the coaches felt we would manage this enormous task!)
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Mon 25 Feb 2019 | Kolsuma Aktar
Embedding your viz onto a html web page
Hi there! I wanted to share with you part of what I learned last week from Jonathan MacDonald [https://twitter.com/macdonaldj] . I’ve never done anything like this, so I was really excited when we were taught how to embed a live interactive tableau dashboard onto a html web page
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Wed 20 Feb 2019 | Kolsuma Aktar
Do spark lines spark your interest?
What are spark lines and why do we use them? Spark lines are small line graphs with minimal text and labels. They allow the you to see a quick overview snapshot of the data in question. They help you see patterns such as seasonality or the general direction of a trend
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Thu 14 Feb 2019 | Kolsuma Aktar
Bars need their space too.
In this post I’m going to show you a simple method for adding extra spacing between certain bars in your chart. This can be useful to make groups or categories clearer
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Mon 11 Feb 2019 | Kolsuma Aktar
University vs The Data School, My Transition
> Hi all! I’m Kolsuma from DS13 and I’ve just finished my first week at The Data School
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