An Old Tool with Enduring Value: Using Excel to Prepare Data for Analysis

Gregory A. Smith

An Old Tool with Enduring Value: Using Excel to Prepare Data for Analysis

Gregory A. Smith

Research output: Other contribution

Abstract

Microsoft Excel was first released on the Windows platform 30 years ago and has since become widely used. Although new tools for manipulating, analyzing, and visualizing data are constantly emerging, Excel remains a potent tool—and not just because of newer features. Simple functions such as TRIM, MID, SUBSTITUTE, FIND, ROUNDDOWN, and VLOOKUP can be used to manipulate data sets in powerful ways.

This workshop applies selected functions to realistic library data sets. Demonstrations include:

deriving time-series categories from date and time stamps
pre-coding survey comments based on keywords
dealing with messy data points such as call numbers and publisher names
removing extraneous punctuation and symbols from textual data
identifying keywords that are misspelled or on a stopword list

Spreadsheets available for download provide simple utilities for performing these tasks. For those interested in creating or modifying formulas, presentation slides illustrate the basics of using selected functions to transform data in Excel.

Original language	Undefined/Unknown
State	Published - Feb 22 2018
Externally published	Yes

Publication series

Name	Faculty Publications and Presentations

Access to Document

Fulltext

http://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/lib_fac_pubs/168

Cite this

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abstract = "Microsoft Excel was first released on the Windows platform 30 years ago and has since become widely used. Although new tools for manipulating, analyzing, and visualizing data are constantly emerging, Excel remains a potent tool—and not just because of newer features. Simple functions such as TRIM, MID, SUBSTITUTE, FIND, ROUNDDOWN, and VLOOKUP can be used to manipulate data sets in powerful ways. This workshop applies selected functions to realistic library data sets. Demonstrations include: deriving time-series categories from date and time stampspre-coding survey comments based on keywordsdealing with messy data points such as call numbers and publisher namesremoving extraneous punctuation and symbols from textual dataidentifying keywords that are misspelled or on a stopword list Spreadsheets available for download provide simple utilities for performing these tasks. For those interested in creating or modifying formulas, presentation slides illustrate the basics of using selected functions to transform data in Excel.",

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AB - Microsoft Excel was first released on the Windows platform 30 years ago and has since become widely used. Although new tools for manipulating, analyzing, and visualizing data are constantly emerging, Excel remains a potent tool—and not just because of newer features. Simple functions such as TRIM, MID, SUBSTITUTE, FIND, ROUNDDOWN, and VLOOKUP can be used to manipulate data sets in powerful ways. This workshop applies selected functions to realistic library data sets. Demonstrations include: deriving time-series categories from date and time stampspre-coding survey comments based on keywordsdealing with messy data points such as call numbers and publisher namesremoving extraneous punctuation and symbols from textual dataidentifying keywords that are misspelled or on a stopword list Spreadsheets available for download provide simple utilities for performing these tasks. For those interested in creating or modifying formulas, presentation slides illustrate the basics of using selected functions to transform data in Excel.

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