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Information, but not data Steve Doig is a 66-year-old professor who teaches at Arizona State University.
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Steve DoigArizona State University
USA
Excel for Journalists
What is “data”?Information in table formColumns are the variables
Name, date, time, address, age, etc.Rows are the records
Persons, incidents, etc.
Information, but not dataSteve Doig is a 66-year-old professor who
teaches at Arizona State University.
Now it’s data!
Last name
First name
Age Title City
DoigSteve 66
Professor Phoenix
Jones Bob 45 Reporter MiamiSmith Susa
n34 Reporter New
York
Why use Excel?Good stories can be found in the
patterns of dataHuman mind alone can’t see the
patterns in large sets of dataExcel has tools to help us see the
patterns in data in table formExcel can handle large tables
More than 16.000 columnsMore than 1 million rows
A blank spreadsheet
What Excel can doImport data from many formatsSort data by one or more variablesFilter data to show only selected rowsTransform data using functions and
formulasSummarize data into categories
Importing dataCommon formats
*.xls (or *.xlsx)Fixed-width textDelimited text (comma, tab, etc)HTML tables
Data Import Wizard will help
Delimited text example
Fixed-width text
Sorting a table
Now it’s sorted
Filtering: Data…Filter...
Pick a category…
Transforming dataMath/stats functions
Add, subtract, multiply, divideAverage, median, maximum, minimumRank, z-scores
Date/Time functionsDay of week, days between
Text functionsExtract parts of text stringsCombine stringsSearch and replace text
Function Wizard (ƒx)
Function Wizard (ƒx)
Function categoriesMath: SUM,INT, SQRT, RANDBETWEENStatistics: AVERAGE, MEDIAN, MAX, MIN,
COUNTText: LEFT, RIGHT, MID, UPCASE, PROPER,
CONCATENATE, LEN,FIND/SEARCH, TRIMDate/Time: YEAR, MONTH, DAY, WEEKDAY,
DAYSBETWEEN, HOUR, MINUTE, SECOND,Logical: IF, AND, OR
Summarizing dataWe 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 exampleData: Institution, state, total students, total
foreign, etc.Question: “What is the total number of
foreign students in each university?”Visualize the piece of paper that would
answer the question
Building a pivot table
Pivot table
Sorted pivot table
Questions?