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 63-year-old professor who teaches at Arizona

State University.

Now it’s data!

Last name

First name Age Title City

Doig Steve 63

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) � 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/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 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

Questions?