Steve Doig Arizona State University USA Excel for Journalists

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 66-year-old professor who teaches at Arizona State University.

Now it’s data! Last name First nameAgeTitleCity DoigSteve66ProfessorPhoenix JonesBob45ReporterMiami SmithSusan34ReporterNew 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 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) 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 data Math/stats functions Add, subtract, multiply, divide Average, median, maximum, minimum Rank, z-scores Date/Time functions Day of week, days between Text functions Extract parts of text strings Combine strings Search and replace text

Function Wizard ( ƒx)

Function categories Math: SUM,INT, SQRT, RANDBETWEEN Statistics: AVERAGE, MEDIAN, MAX, MIN, COUNT Text: LEFT, RIGHT, MID, UPCASE, PROPER, CONCATENATE, LEN,FIND/SEARCH, TRIM Date/Time: YEAR, MONTH, DAY, WEEKDAY, DAYSBETWEEN, HOUR, MINUTE, SECOND, Logical: IF, AND, OR

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: 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?