Adam's Blogroll: click through to the author's blog
Coming up on 40 years old, Emmett Shear, perhaps best known as a co-founder of Twitch, reflected on his time so far using a spreadsheet. He marked where he lived in the left column, years run top to bottom, and months run left to right. Cells are colored by the main thing going on his life.
You can access the sheet here, in case you want to make one for your own life.
Tags: Emmett Shear, spreadsheet, timeline
Posted by in Emmett Shear, Self-surveillance, spreadsheet, Timeline
For Datawrapper, Lisa Charlotte Rost outlines the steps to prepare and clean your data in Excel or Google Spreadsheets. From the beginning:
When you download an Excel file, it often has multiple sheets. Our data set has three of them, as seen on the bottom: “Data”, “Metadata – Countries” and “Metadata – Indicators”. Look through all of your sheets and make sure you understand what you’re seeing there. Do the headers, file name and/or data itself indicates that you downloaded the right file? Are there footnotes? What do they tell you? Maybe that you’re dealing with lots of estimates? (Does that maybe mean that you need to look for other data?) If you don’t find notes in the data, make sure you look for them on the website of your source.
The guide is in the context of prepping your data to load into the Datawrapper tool, but the advice easily applies more generally.
Tags: cleaning, Excel, spreadsheet
Posted by in cleaning, Excel, software, spreadsheet
A lot of data you get are estimates with uncertainty attached. Plus or minus something. Standard error. So when you try to do math with those numbers straight up, ignoring the uncertainty, you end up with a result that seems concrete but it's actually more squishy.
Guesstimate, made by Ozzie Gooen, is an effort to include the uncertainty in your spreadsheets.
The first reaction of many people to uncertain math is to use the same techniques as for certain math. They would either imagine each unknown as an exact mean, or take ‘worst case’ and ‘best case’ scenarios and multiply each one. These two approaches are quite incorrect and produce oversimplified outputs.
Guesstimate works like a regular spreadsheet where you input numbers into cells. But you can also include the uncertainty estimates, which is where it gets interesting. Piece together cells, and then using a Monte Carlo method, Guesstimate generates a new estimate with its own uncertainty.
Tags: spreadsheet, uncertainty
Posted by in Online Applications, spreadsheet, uncertainty
Planet Money goes back to a 1984 article by Steven Levy that discusses this new thing called a spreadsheet. It was taking the place of the paper version that accountants manually edited, added to, and taped together.
From the original article, a fine use of quotation marks:
All this powerful scenario-testing machinery right there on the desktop induces some people to experiment with elaborate models. They talk of "playing" with the numbers, "massaging" the model. Computer "hackers" lose themselves in the intricacies of programming; spreadsheet hackers lose themselves in the world of what-if.
Sound familiar? Have a listen below. It's not nearly as boring as it sounds.
Tags: Excel, Planet Money, spreadsheet
Posted by in Excel, Planet Money, software, spreadsheet