Simon Evans

Coming from a sport science background, Simon has always worked with data throughout his academic and professional career.

Roles at Widnes Rugby League and more recently Manchester United FC, alongside working for his PhD from Liverpool John Moores University saw him analyse the increasing masses of data which are becoming available examining player performance and injury risk in elite sport.

Frustrated with the limitations of Excel to produce dashboards and reports, Simon was introduced to Tableau whilst working at Manchester United by the Information Lab's Andy Pick who came into the training ground to provide a two day training course for some of the staff. Simon quickly realised the power Tableau had to produce more compelling visualisations with deeper levels of insight and subsequently has never looked back.

Simon is a keen sportsman, and enjoys playing and watching football and cricket, playing the guitar, cooking, and going dog walking in the Peak District.

Blog Posts

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Wed 04 Aug 2021 | Simon Evans
Spatial Analysis in Alteryx Part 1: The Basics - Points, Lines, and Polygons
There are some nifty tools and features to play around with spatial data in Alteryx. But what is spatial data? In basic terms spatial data is information about shapes and locations of geographical features and the relationships between them. Spatial data can be made up of 1
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Fri 26 Mar 2021 | Simon Evans
DS22 | Dashboard Week Day 5 - Boy Bands
Day 5 saw us look at boy bands! The internet boy bands database can be found here [https://pudding.cool/2018/11/boy-bands/]. The data is available on github here [https://github.com/the-pudding/data/tree/master/boybands]. There are two files to download and join: bands.csv [https://github
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Thu 25 Mar 2021 | Simon Evans
DS22 | Dashboard Week Day 4 | Food Waste
Day 4 saw us examine food waste. The data comes from OECD [https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/agriculture-and-food/data/waste/food-waste_ba9da2b7-en?parent=http%3A%2F%2Finstance.metastore.ingenta.com%2Fcontent%2Fcollection%2Fenv-data-en]
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Tue 23 Mar 2021 | Simon Evans
DS22 Dashboard Week Day 2 | Hail Storms in America
Day 2 looks at us analysing Hail Storms in America.  The data comes from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration - NOAA [https://www.spc.noaa.gov/gis/svrgis/] and has been nicely formatted by the Oasis Hub here [https://oasishub.co/dataset/usa-hail-historical-record-noaa]
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Mon 22 Mar 2021 | Simon Evans
Dashboard Week Day 1: Historical Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Day 1 of dashboard week began for DS22 looking at global greenhouse gas emissions. The data we were provided with can be downloaded from the following link: Global - CAIT Emission History (1850-2012) & Projections to 2100 - World Resources Institute - Datasets - OasisHUB [https://oasishub
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Fri 12 Mar 2021 | Simon Evans
Using Alteryx to access Marvel Comics API
In this blog post, I will talk you through how to make a call to the Marvel API in order to access data regarding Marvel Comic book characters. The first thing we need to do is to sign up to the Marvel API website in order to obtain 2 API keys: https://developer.marvel
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Sat 13 Feb 2021 | Simon Evans
How to create a macro to parse UK Petition Data in Alteryx
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Sat 09 Jan 2021 | Simon Evans
The Journey from Prep to Desktop: Preppin’ Data 2020 Week 49 Challenge – First Week at the DS
Reflecting on a busy but thoroughly enjoyable first week in training at the DS, I thought I would write a blog on the first project DS22 group 2 were assigned with.  This week focused heavily on using Data Preparation Tools (Alteryx and Tableau Prep)
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