Towards the end of my time as a Data Schooler in Training, I’d like to share some of the resources I found to be helpful to my training. Some of these will be great to use in any profession, while others are more specific.
1. Notepad++
Has been my text editor of choice while at the Data School, it is very useful for typing out code, finding and replacing text, and having a general overview of the HTML of a web-page I have scraped. I really like how easy it is to change the ‘language’ in Notepad, so it colours and assists you for different coding syntax. I found this particularly useful when creating our own Tableau Colour Palette ‘.tps’ files.
2. ColorPic
We used this for getting the 6 character codes for each colour from a screen. This a great for making your own colour palettes in Tableau. I found this really helpful because sometimes I struggle differentiating between similar colours, and I could be sure of which colour I was using by getting the code.
3. Color-Blindness.com
Was a great site to help gain insight into how my Dashboards would look for people with colour blindness. There are a great many resources online than can help with this, I found this one informative and straight forward to use.
https://www.color-blindness.com/coblis-color-blindness-simulator/
4. Greenshot
Is an alternative to the default ‘snipping tool’, except better. It allows you to really accurately take screenshots and do basic modifications to the resulting images. I found the ‘Obfuscate’ tool to be really useful for blurring or hiding information. (see below for an example)
5. ScreenToGif
Is the application some of us used to make some gifs for my blogs. It involved positioning a box around the desired part of your screen, and pressing ‘record’. Tip: if your mouse needs to be part of the gif, you can set the recorder to start after 3 seconds. Here are some links to some blogs that contain some gifs;
- Dashboard Week Day 4: The Worlds Anti-Vax Problem
- Dashboard Week Day 2, Coffee Pods and Plastic Waste
- Learning to Code, Starting From Scratch
6. Search Everything
Is a downloadable app I only discovered recently (thanks to Alekh from DSAU2). It allows you to easily search through the files on your computer. It is great for finding files that were poorly named at the time, or poorly placed (everyone does it). I also found it helpful to find the files that are taking up lots of space. Search everything has wildcard and even Regex search capabilities!
7. Regex101
Was my favorite online Regex Tester. I liked it because of the colouration groups it applies to the matches within my test string. I found myself using this site every time I had to write any Regex.
Honorable Mentions
- Math Input Panel
- Grammarly
- Rstudio
- https://gifmaker.me/
- https://www.w3schools.com/
Thanks for reading! Any feedback (or any other resource suggestions) are welcome!