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Excel for Journalists
Steve DoigArizona State University
USA
What is “data”? Information in table form Columns are the variables
Name, date, time, address, age, etc. Rows are the records
Persons, incidents, etc.
Information, but not data Steve Doig is a 62-year-old
professor who teaches at Arizona State University.
Now it’s data!
Last name
First name
Age Title City
DoigSteve 62
Professor Phoenix
Jones Bob 45 Reporter Miami
Smith Tom 34 Reporter New York
Why use Excel? Good stories can be found in the
patterns of data Human mind alone can’t see the
patterns in large sets of data Excel has tools to help us see the
patterns in data in table form Excel can handle large tables
More than 16.000 columns More than 1 million rows
A blank spreadsheet
What Excel can do Import data from many formats Sort data by one or more variables Filter data to show only selected
rows Transform data using functions
and formulas Summarize data into categories
Importing data Common formats
*.xls (or *.xlsx) Fixed-width text Delimited text (comma, tab, etc) *.dbf files (old dBase) HTML tables
Data Import Wizard will help
Delimited text example
Fixed-width text
Sorting a table
Now it’s sorted
Filtering: Data…Filter…Autofilter
Pick a category…
…and see just that
Transforming data Math functions
Add, subtract, multiply, divide Average, median, maximum, minimum
Date/Time functions Day of week, days between
Text functions Extract parts of text strings Search and replace text
Function Wizard (ƒx)
Function Wizard (ƒx)
Summarizing data We often want to take a big
collection of individual records and pile them into categories
Trick: Visualize the piece of paper that would give you the answer you seek
Tool: Pivot tables
Pivot table example Data: Region, town name, crimes,
etc. Question: “How many crimes
occurred in each region?” Visualize the piece of paper that
would answer the question
Building a pivot table
Pivot table
Sorted pivot table
EXERCISE!
www.public.asu.edu/~sdoig/UNL
(get Excel crime data)