So it looks like this will become a series (see Converting PDFs to Excel). This one will cover some simple tricks on cleaning data in Excel. Too often you end up with blank lines, bad data, or duplicates that you need to clean before the data is analyzed. This post will cover some techniques you …
Category Archive
for: ‘Excel’
Data Analyst’s Toolbox: Getting Data from PDFs
This is the first post on what may become a larger series on improving your productivity as someone who works with data. Too often I get a digital PDF from a customer that I need to do some analysis on (we won’t go into why legacy systems insist on only providing PDFs, or printing to …
Embedding Excel Workbooks (could easily be a dashboard)
Microsoft web apps are advancing nicely now – you are no longer tied to Facebook as the way to share documents – you can use Microsoft’s Skydrive. You can also embed documents, as shown below. I’ve recreated a table from an organization called the Third Way, “the leading moderate think-tank of the progressive movement”, apparently. …
PowerPivot: A video introduction from MrExcel
Bill Jelen, aka MrExcel has written the first book on Microsoft’s new PowerPivot. PowerPivot is a the Office 2010 solution to link Excel to millions of rows of data held on databases or large text files. PowerPivot will ensure that Excel remains a useful, and perhaps even more serious, dashboard tool. I found this video …
Twitter Sparkline Generator!
The app that everyone’s been waiting for. After months (20 minutes) of coding and Q&A, Data Driven is proud to release Sparkbars! In Twitter! v2.0 You may need to right click and save as an xls to stop the .zip being added. As Twitter now accepts Unicode, we can use the block elements to create …
Dashboard seminar – mark your calendars
I’m sure most readers of my blog will know Jon Peltier’s business, and his excellent Excel/charting blog: Peltier Technical Services. Jon and I are teaming up to present a day-long training session on Excel Charting and Dashboarding. This training will take place on Wednesday, June 2, 2010, at the DoubleTree Hotel in Westborough, MA, in the Route 495 …
Data visualization challenge: my dashboard design
Finally we get to the choices I made for my dashboard entry into Chandoo’s data visualization challenge. The challenge already directed us to make the dashboard focused on the two year performance of the sales people. I’ll break this post into the five or so parts of the (single screen) dashboard. Easily overlooked, but vital, …
Excel 2010: Sparklines, not too shabby
There’s been some excitement in the data visualization world about Excel 2010′s sparkline implementation (we’re an easily excited bunch), and less excitement about a patent application that Microsoft has applied for concerning the sparklines (lots of prior art). Anyway, I’ve played with them a little – they are pretty robust and for a first implementation, …
