Finding Stories in Spreadsheets
Finding Stories in Spreadsheets
Recipes for interviewing data - and getting answers
About the Book
One spreadsheet can tell many stories. You just have to know the right questions to ask.
Based on a decade of training journalists and working with news organisations on data-driven stories, Finding Stories In Spreadsheets outlines the techniques for asking the right questions of data using tools like Excel and Google spreadsheets.
These aren't just questions about numbers: you'll find out how spreadsheet techniques can help you find the 'needle in the haystack' in text data. You'll learn how to clean up and modify your data so that you can ask it different questions, or get it ready for maps or charts, how to create new data from raw materials, and how to combine datasets to look for connections and trends.
With regular examples from journalism and real life data to work with, Finding Stories In Spreadsheets is *full* of those questions, in the language that spreadsheets understand.
Cover image concept by @CarolineBeavon. Illustration by Matt Buck at Drawnalism.
About the Author
Bundles that include this book
Table of Contents
- Introduction
-
Stories about change, stories in context: basic calculations
- Cell references
- Calculating a change
- Calculating a proportion
- Ratios: calculating a proportion as ‘1 in 10’
- Combining both: calculating what proportion a change is
- Recap
-
Saving time to hit a deadline: repeating and fixing a calculation across cells
- Shortcut: repeating a calculation down hundreds of cells with one double-click
- What if I want to fix the cell reference so it doesn’t change when pasted?
- Recap
- The last chapter’s story: are there more drunk and disorderly arrests?
-
How much did it cost? How many people were affected? The first function: adding a series of cells with
SUM- If functions are recipes, arguments are the ingredients
- When there’s more than one ingredient: commas and semicolons
- Recap
-
Who’s top, who’s bottom?
MAX,MIN, and sorting- MAX and MIN
- Recap
- The last chapter’s story: drunk and disorderly arrest totals
-
Detour: getting to know the spreadsheet - useful shortcuts and tips to avoid mistakes
- Keyboard shortcuts to explore your data quickly
- Changing your data: remove empty rows before the headings
- Recap
-
Hitting the deadline: understanding and formatting the data - number or text
- Numbers
- Text
- Recap
-
Best sellers and averages:
MEDIAN,AVERAGEandMODE- Calculating an average: AVERAGE, MEDIAN or MODE?
- Man made or natural?
- Recap
-
How many payments? How many people? Counting, not adding up:
COUNT- The story is what’s missing: COUNTBLANK
- Recap
- The last chapter’s story: political donations
-
Only count if… setting criteria for a formula:
COUNTIF- Counting something specific
- Looking for cells containing words within sentences: the wildcards
- Trial and error: the single-cell test
- Counting against combined criteria: COUNTIFS
- Recap
- The last chapter’s story: missing donations data?
-
If… continued: setting criteria for a sum:
SUMIF- Recap
- The last story: how many donations fit the bill?
-
Putting the story into context, or looking from a fresh angle: merging data from different tables using
VLOOKUP- Dry run: two small tables on the same sheet
- Using VLOOKUP on data in different sheets
- Those pesky #N/A results
- Recap
- The last chapter’s story: what proportion of donations came from small donors?
-
My data is dirty! Basic cleaning using
TRIM,CLEANandSUBSTITUTE- Those pesky spaces
-
Getting rid of ‘non printing’ characters:
CLEAN - And or ampersand? Substituting particular words or characters
- Recap
- The last chapter’s story: baby name trends
-
Detour: generating consecutive numbers or dates
- Other number sequences
- Text sequences: days and months
- Getting more control over your ranges - the Fill Series option
-
Using more than one function at a time: nested functions
- Nesting functions
- Recap
-
Generating categories and other extra data:
IF- Testing more than one thing - nested IF
- Hello operators: comparing beyond ‘greater than’ or ‘less than’
- Testing text: combining IF with other functions
- Recap
- The last chapter’s story: simplifying names to make them consistent with another dataset
-
Detour: testing whether something is TRUE or FALSE
- Logical tests with text
- Adding up TRUE and FALSE
- Functions which return logical results
- Recap
-
Finding errors or missing data - and testing data types:
ISERR,ISBLANK,ISTEXTand others- Functions for testing data types
- Functions that look for errors, or types of errors
-
Using
ISfunctions in practice: an error-checking column - Recap
- The last chapter’s story: converting restaurant ratings into categories
-
Testing two things at once:
AND,ORandNOT- Finding outliers at the top or bottom: OR
- Finding one of a series of possible text values: OR
- Finding numbers in the middle, or in a particular range: AND
- Applying criteria across multiple columns
-
Combining with
IFto avoid multipleIFtests - Making multiple negative tests
- Recap
- The last chapter’s story: classifying non-rated hygiene reports
-
What day did that date fall on? Which year was the worst? Extracting days, months and years from full dates
- Extracting dates, months and years: DAY, MONTH and YEAR
- Extracting days and months as words or years as ‘66, ‘94 etc: TEXT
- Using the Format Cells ‘Custom’ option to do the same thing to existing dates
- Hours and minutes: HOUR, MINUTE, SECOND and TEXT again
- When things don’t go as you expect them to: dealing with errors in date functions
- Recap
- Finding the story: which outlets have consistently bad scores?
-
How old is someone? Ages and using
TODAY’s date- Breaking down the problem
- Calculating the years
- Checking whether a birthday comes before or after a date
- Making an adjustment based on the results
-
Using
TODAYto calculate an age against today’s date - Making it easy to understand: breaking the formula back up
- Other ways of calculating ages: the unsupported DATEDIF function
- Watching out for leap years in other calculations
- Recap
- Finding the story: what years and months are worst for hygiene inspections?
-
Grabbing or checking the first, middle or last part of a piece of information:
RIGHT,LEFTandMID- Grabbing characters from the beginning: LEFT
- Grabbing characters from the end: RIGHT
- Grabbing characters from the middle: MID
- What if the starting position or number of characters depends? Introducing LEN
- What if the starting position or number of characters depends? Part two: SEARCH and FIND
- Recap
- Finding the story: how old are Guantanamo prisoners?
-
Case study: When you get data in sentences: using
SEARCHand error handling to extract numbers from phrases- Break down the steps
-
Identify where the years/months are detailed: using
SEARCH - Extract the number of years/months (and correct for problems)
- Handling an unnecessary space
- Converting to a common measure
- Manual cleaning: identifying unusual words
- Adding a ‘checking’ formulae
- Key points
-
Putting names, addresses and other data back together:
CONCATENATE,&and adding special characters withCHAR-
The alternative to
CONCATENATE:& - Recap
- Tell the story: finding special characters
-
The alternative to
-
More data cleaning: formatting text or numbers consistently with
UPPER,LOWER,PROPERandFIXED-
Rounding and formatting numbers:
FIXEDandROUND - Showing figures as millions or billions without all the zeroes
- Recap
-
Rounding and formatting numbers:
-
Changing rows into columns, and vice versa:
TRANSPOSE-
The
TRANSPOSEfunction in Excel - for when you need data to always be transposed -
The
TRANSPOSEfunction in Google Sheets - no need for keyboard shortcuts - The Paste Special option: the one-off transpose
- Recap
-
The
-
Repeating calculations across multiple cells or to create the ingredients of a single function: array formulae
- Arrays in practice: back to the drunk and disorderly data
- Changing or extending an array formula
- Multiple calculations with one result: using an array formula in a single cell
- Generating your own arrays
- Array constants used in a formula
- Recap
- The last chapter’s story: when’s the worst time to turn up at hospital?
- Detour: An introduction to Google Sheets - an always-connected spreadsheet tool
- Make sure the settings are for your country
-
Grabbing data from elsewhere -
IMPORTandGOOGLEfunctions in Google Sheets-
Pulling data from another sheet:
IMPORTRANGE -
Grabbing data from online CSVs and TXT files:
IMPORTDATA -
Grabbing data from webpage tables and lists:
IMPORTHTML -
Grabbing data from RSS feeds:
IMPORTFEED -
Grabbing data from an XML document - or a HTML webpage:
IMPORTXML -
Using
IMPORTXMLto grab data from HTML webpages - Grabbing links and other values that are not in visible text
- Recap
- Exercises
-
Pulling data from another sheet:
-
Dealing with data in another language:
GOOGLETRANSLATEandDETECTLANGUAGE-
Detecting the language:
DETECTLANGUAGE -
Using
DETECTLANGUAGEas part ofGOOGLETRANSLATE - False friends and cognates
- Tip: translating a term to generate search URLs in other languages
- Recap
-
IMPORTExercises - tips
-
Detecting the language:
-
Converting currency or using stock prices:
GOOGLEFINANCE-
Converting currency with
GOOGLEFINANCE -
Grabbing stock values with
GOOGLEFINANCE - Recap
-
Converting currency with
-
Publishing live data in a live chart
- Recap
-
Exercise: grabbing and visualising live data with
IMPORTHTMLand live charts
-
Comparing change visually by generating sparkline charts for every row:
SPARKLINE-
Writing a
SPARKLINEformula - Customising how the sparkline appears: bar charts
- Keeping it relative: specifying minimum and maximum scale
- Recap
-
Last chapter exercise: grabbing and visualising live data with
IMPORTHTMLand live charts
-
Writing a
-
Asking questions (or allowing users to), SQL-style:
QUERY-
Forming the question:
Select,WhereandOrder by -
More complex clauses:
group byandpivot - Writing queries with multiple or alternative criteria
- Generating ‘hackable’ URLs which allow users to see the data their own way
- Using a form to allow users to generate their own results pages
-
Examples of
QUERYbeing used in code - Recap
-
Forming the question:
-
Adding some randomness: spreading out locations randomly using
RAND-
RAND: Give me a number between 1 and 0 -
RANDBETWEEN: Give me a number between whatever I say! - Recap
- Exercise: generate random placemarks on a map - within reason
-
-
Is this value ranked high or low? What value is 3rd?
RANK,LARGEandSMALL-
Using the
RANKfunction -
Finding values at a particular rank:
LARGEandSMALL - Recap
-
Using the
-
What percentile is this at or above?
PERCENTRANKandPERCENTILE- Percentile functions
-
What percent of values are smaller?
PERCENTRANK -
What value is at the nth percentile?
PERCENTILE - Exercise: using both sets of functions with marathon race times
- Recap
-
Classifying data into top, middle and bottom quarters:
QUARTILE-
Using the
QUARTILEfunction - Applying quartile values to classify data into four quarters
- Recap
-
Using the
-
Cross referencing and advanced cell references: naming cells and using
INDIRECT,INDEXandMATCH- Naming cells
-
INDIRECT - Cross-referencing cells based on values in other cells
-
INDEX -
Working out which index to grab:
MATCH - Exercise: Finding where schoolchildren go outside their area
- Recap
-
Getting statistical: correlation with
CORRELand other ways of testing data- How strong is the relationship between two columns of numbers?
-
Using the
CORRELfunction - Once you have a result
- Recap
- Try it out
-
The final chapter: next steps
- What else can Excel do? Add-ins, templates and VBA
- Tell me your problems
Other books by this author
Authors have earned$10,352,453writing, publishing and selling on Leanpub, earning 80% royalties while saving up to 25 million pounds of CO2 and up to 46,000 trees.
Learn more about writing on Leanpub
The Leanpub 45-day 100% Happiness Guarantee
Within 45 days of purchase you can get a 100% refund on any Leanpub purchase, in two clicks.
See full terms
Free Updates. DRM Free.
If you buy a Leanpub book, you get free updates for as long as the author updates the book! Many authors use Leanpub to publish their books in-progress, while they are writing them. All readers get free updates, regardless of when they bought the book or how much they paid (including free).
Most Leanpub books are available in PDF (for computers), EPUB (for phones and tablets) and MOBI (for Kindle). The formats that a book includes are shown at the top right corner of this page.
Finally, Leanpub books don't have any DRM copy-protection nonsense, so you can easily read them on any supported device.
Learn more about Leanpub's ebook formats and where to read them
Top Books
- #1
Continuous Delivery Pipelines
Dave FarleyThis practical handbook provides a step-by-step guide for you to get the best continuous delivery pipeline for your software.
- #2
Rector - The Power of Automated Refactoring
Matthias Noback and Tomas Votruba - #3
Top 20 Digital Health Trends For The Near Future
Dr. Bertalan MeskoDigital technology could help transform unsustainable healthcare systems, provide cheaper, faster, and more effective solutions for diseases – and could lead to healthier individuals living in healthier communities.
In this book, we analyze the top 20 trends shaping the future of healthcare, and what they all look like in practice.
- #4
Learning Algorithms Through Programming and Puzzle Solving
Alexander S. Kulikov and Pavel PevznerThis book powers our MicroMasters program on edX and specialization on Coursera, one of the ten most popular computer science courses on Coursera. Over half a million students have tried to solve many programming challenges and algorithmic puzzles described in this book. We invite you to join them! See the webpage of the book for more details.
- #5
Ansible for DevOps
Jeff GeerlingAnsible is a simple, but powerful, server and configuration management tool. Learn to use Ansible effectively, whether you manage one server—or thousands.
- #6
Introducing EventStorming
Alberto BrandoliniThe deepest tutorial and explanation about EventStorming, straight from the inventor.
- #7
Atomic Kotlin
Bruce Eckel and Svetlana IsakovaFor both beginning and experienced programmers! From the author of the multi-award-winning Thinking in C++ and Thinking in Java together with a member of the Kotlin language team comes a book that breaks the concepts into small, easy-to-digest "atoms," along with exercises supported by hints and solutions directly inside IntelliJ IDEA!
- #8
C++20
Rainer GrimmC++20 is the next big C++ standard after C++11. As C++11 did it, C++20 changes the way we program modern C++. This change is, in particular, due to the big four of C++20: ranges, coroutines, concepts, and modules.
- #9
The Hundred-Page Machine Learning Book
Andriy BurkovEverything you really need to know in Machine Learning in a hundred pages.
- #10
C++ Best Practices
Jason TurnerLevel up your C++, get the tools working for you, eliminate common problems, and move on to more exciting things!
Top Bundles
- #1
Software Architecture for Developers: Volumes 1 & 2 - Technical leadership and communication
2 Books
"Software Architecture for Developers" is a practical and pragmatic guide to modern, lightweight software architecture, specifically aimed at developers. You'll learn:The essence of software architecture.Why the software architecture role should include coding, coaching and collaboration.The things that you really need to think about before... - #2
CCIE Service Provider Ultimate Study Bundle
2 Books
Piotr Jablonski, Lukasz Bromirski, and Nick Russo have joined forces to deliver the only CCIE Service Provider training resource you'll ever need. This bundle contains a detailed and challenging collection of workbook labs, plus an extensively detailed technical reference guide. All of us have earned the CCIE Service Provider certification... - #3
The Python Craftsman
3 Books
The Python Craftsman series comprises The Python Apprentice, The Python Journeyman, and The Python Master. The first book is primarily suitable for for programmers with some experience of programming in another language. If you don't have any experience with programming this book may be a bit daunting. You'll be learning not just a programming...
