Steve DoigArizona State University

USA

Excel for Journalists

What is “data”?Information in table formColumns are the variables

Name, date, time, address, age, etc.Rows are the records

Persons, incidents, etc.

Information, but not dataSteve Doig is a 63-year-old professor who

teaches at Arizona State University.

Now it’s data!

Last name

First name

Age Title City

DoigSteve 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 dataHuman mind alone can’t see the

patterns in large sets of dataExcel has tools to help us see the

patterns in data in table formExcel can handle large tables

More than 16.000 columnsMore than 1 million rows

A blank spreadsheet

What Excel can doImport data from many formatsSort data by one or more variablesFilter data to show only selected rowsTransform data using functions and

formulasSummarize data into categories

Importing dataCommon formats

*.xls (or *.xlsx)Fixed-width textDelimited 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 dataMath/stats functions

Add, subtract, multiply, divideAverage, median, maximum, minimumRank, z-scores

Date/Time functionsDay of week, days between

Text functionsExtract parts of text stringsCombine stringsSearch and replace text

Function Wizard (ƒx)

Function Wizard (ƒx)

Summarizing dataWe 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 exampleData: 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?