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What is data?
- Things and their attributes
- How do spreadsheets present data? Rows and columns, things and attributes
- Example, plants? Coconut tree, fig tree, parsley, strawberry, silver beat
- Why use a spreadsheet to work with this data? Graphic and usable way to build and organise data
- Quick and powerful analysis tool
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Building spreadsheet data
- Let's open a Google Spreadsheets
- Attendees come up with their own examples and make a spreadsheet
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Basic tools
- Provide a spreadsheet for people to use
- Formatting, what can you do, what's recommended?
- Sorting
- Data types, what are they about?
- Text to columns to remove formatting and use the correct data type: remove the "$" in "$10,123.70"
- Filtering
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Pivot tables
- Questioning data
- What is the total X?
- How does A compare to B?
- Building a pivot table
- Questioning data
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Simple data formats
- csv
- json
Basic spreadsheet tools:
- Google Sheets https://www.google.com/sheets/about/
- Libre Office Calc https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/calc/
- Excel: "industry standard" https://products.office.com/en-us/excel
Specialist tools:
- Tad: read only spreadsheet tool for analysis https://www.tadviewer.com/
- Open Refine: Cleaning and fixing up messy data http://openrefine.org/
- Ruby CSV Class: for reading and writing CSV data in Ruby https://ruby-doc.org/stdlib-2.4.1/libdoc/csv/rdoc/CSV.html
- Tableau public: Visual analysis, and kind of publishing https://public.tableau.com/en-us/s/
- Carto: Maps data that has a location attribute https://carto.com/