Tom Stinson

Following his graduation in Biological Sciences from the University of Leicester Tom was looking for a new path. After a period in retail and a brief stint in marketing he quickly realised his real drive during university was analytics and started looking for a way into the world of data.

Upon finding the Data School and starting the application he instantly took to Tableau, a far throw from RStudio that he used in university. Its intuitive nature and complex analytic tools provided a unique platform for him, and with his desire to learn he hopes this will allow him to bring analytics and insights to people that need them. Alongside Tableau he has spent time learning Alteryx and achieved his core certification, and also spent time learning SQL.

Tom's first placement was at BAE Systems. This built upon his skills learnt in training and allowed him to use aforementioned skills in both Tableau and Alteryx to deliver projects and insights for stakeholders.

Outside of work Tom can be found mountaineering, watching Formula 1, playing video games or losing at table tennis.

Blog Posts

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Fri 02 Aug 2024 | Tom Stinson
Power BI Field Parameters - Easy Switching
Field Parameters are a useful feature of Power BI if you want to have features on your dashboard that can quickly change between different fields
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Fri 29 Jul 2022 | Tom Stinson
Schools out........ For the weekend?
Today was the last day of data school, and its been a blast. However, this blog isn't about that, this blog is about the importance of checking the brief
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Thu 28 Jul 2022 | Tom Stinson
Insert Cheesy Title Here
Day three of dashboard week was all about the cheese. This inevitably led to puns and an entertaining dashboard, but getting the data was more complicated. We had to webscrape from a cheese website, getting the links to webpages of individual cheeses, before webscraping each of those
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Wed 27 Jul 2022 | Tom Stinson
How Creative Can a Dashboard Be?
Day 2 of dashboard week was the creative day. A day where we were given football data and nothing else. 'Let your creative juices flow' was the idea. Fast forward 7 hours and I'm presenting a dashboard about the successes of teams on either side of the Iron Curtain during the Cold War
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Tue 26 Jul 2022 | Tom Stinson
Accessibility - Retrofit or Ground Up?
Building accessibility into a dashboard is something that is hugely important but rarely done properly. This week was my first attempt to build accessibility into a dashboard from the ground up and, whilst a lot went well, a lot could have gone better
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Tue 19 Jul 2022 | Tom Stinson
Using window_*** in Tableau
Using window_something calculations in Tableau took me a long time to wrap my head around. This blog is here to help anyone else who might need a push in the right direction to begin understanding them too
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Mon 18 Jul 2022 | Tom Stinson
Clustering in Alteryx
Clustering is an interesting concept. Being able to group members is extremely powerful, as is any predictive analytics, but you have to be sure to be careful when deciding what to group by and how many clusters you build as this can massively swing your results
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Fri 29 Apr 2022 | Tom Stinson
Time flies when you're using Dateparse()
Week 4 was a rollercoaster of Tableau, covering everything from the data model to teaching. One of the topics touched on was date functions and their uses. We covered several of the date functions and in this blog I will attempt to clear up how they work and what they do for everyone interested
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Thu 05 May 2022 | Tom Stinson
Tableau Joining 2; Intersecting Spatial Boogaloo
Joining spatial data that intersects is easier in Alteryx than it is in Tableau (my opinion, see for yourself). However, if you really want to do it this is how you can. Step 1: Check data. Make sure that both of your datasets have geo-spatial values. This can be a shape (e.g
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Thu 14 Apr 2022 | Tom Stinson
Fixing a viz is the name of the biz(ness)
The project for week 2 was to recreate a Makeover Monday Viz of our choice and use skills leant that week to critique and improve the viz in Tableau. I originally chose to remake a bicycle statistic viz, but was persuaded not to by my cohort after realizing that my last project was a similar idea
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Tue 12 Apr 2022 | Tom Stinson
Making charts was slow until I met Tableau
Second week started with an in-depth dive into graph types and how to make them
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Thu 07 Apr 2022 | Tom Stinson
So it begins
Week 1 ended with DS31 remaking our original application dashboard using skills learned during the first week. Returning to the original dashboard data was a bit of a shock, and trying to decipher what I had done two months ago even more
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