1. Excel for Journalists Steve Doig Arizona State University USA

2. What is “data”? Information in table form Columns are the variables Name, date, time, address, age, etc. Rows are the records Persons, incidents, etc.

3. Information, but not data Steve Doig is a 62-year-old professor who teaches at Arizona State University.

4. Now it’s data! Last name First nameAgeTitleCity DoigSteve62ProfessorPhoenix JonesBob45ReporterMiami SmithTom34ReporterNew York

5. 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

6. A blank spreadsheet

7. 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

8. 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

9. Delimited text example

10. Fixed-width text

11. Sorting a table

12. Now it’s sorted

13. Filtering: Data…Filter…Autofilter

14. Pick a category…

15. …and see just that

16. 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

17. Function Wizard ( ƒx)

19. 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

20. 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

21. Building a pivot table

22. Pivot table

23. Sorted pivot table

24. EXERCISE! www.public.asu.edu/~sdoig/UNL (get Excel crime data)