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Unlocking Data Insights for Journalists with Excel

This resource, led by Steve Doig from Arizona State University, introduces journalists to the power of data in storytelling. It explains key concepts such as data organization in tables, with columns representing variables and rows as records. Learn why Excel is a vital tool for uncovering patterns in large datasets, featuring capabilities like data importation, sorting, filtering, and transformation. Additionally, discover how to summarize data effectively with pivot tables. This essential guide helps journalists harness the potential of data to enhance their reporting.

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Unlocking Data Insights for Journalists with Excel

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Presentation Transcript

  1. Excel for Journalists Steve Doig Arizona State University USA

  2. What is “data”? • Information in table form • Columns are the variables • Name, date, time, address, age, etc. • Rows are the records • Persons, incidents, etc.

  3. Information, but not data • Steve Doig is a 62-year-old professor who teaches at Arizona State University.

  4. Now it’s data!

  5. 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

  6. A blank spreadsheet

  7. 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

  8. Importing data • Common formats • *.xls (or *.xlsx) • Fixed-width text • Delimited text (comma, tab, etc) • *.dbf files (old dBase) • HTML tables • Data Import Wizard will help

  9. Delimited text example

  10. Fixed-width text

  11. Sorting a table

  12. Now it’s sorted

  13. Filtering: Data…Filter…Autofilter

  14. Pick a category…

  15. …and see just that

  16. Transforming data • Math functions • Add, subtract, multiply, divide • Average, median, maximum, minimum • Date/Time functions • Day of week, days between • Text functions • Extract parts of text strings • Search and replace text

  17. Function Wizard (ƒx)

  18. Function Wizard (ƒx)

  19. 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

  20. 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

  21. Building a pivot table

  22. Pivot table

  23. Sorted pivot table

  24. EXERCISE! www.public.asu.edu/~sdoig/UNL (get Excel crime data)

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