Book Image

Data Smart

By : John W. Foreman
Book Image

Data Smart

By: John W. Foreman

Overview of this book

Data Science gets thrown around in the press like it's magic. Major retailers are predicting everything from when their customers are pregnant to when they want a new pair of Chuck Taylors. It's a brave new world where seemingly meaningless data can be transformed into valuable insight to drive smart business decisions. But how does one exactly do data science? Do you have to hire one of these priests of the dark arts, the "data scientist," to extract this gold from your data? Nope. Data science is little more than using straight-forward steps to process raw data into actionable insight. And in Data Smart, author and data scientist John Foreman will show you how that's done within the familiar environment of a spreadsheet. Why a spreadsheet? It's comfortable! You get to look at the data every step of the way, building confidence as you learn the tricks of the trade. Plus, spreadsheets are a vendor-neutral place to learn data science without the hype. But don't let the Excel sheets fool you. This is a book for those serious about learning the analytic techniques, math and the magic, behind big data.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Cover
2
Credits
3
About the Author
4
About the Technical Editors
5
Acknowledgments
18
End User License Agreement

Moving Quickly with the Control Button

If you want to peruse the records, you can scroll down the sheet with your scroll wheel, track pad, or down arrow. As you scroll, it's helpful to keep the header row locked at the top of the sheet, so you can remember what each column means. To do that, choose Freeze Panes or Freeze Top Row from the “View” tab on Windows (“Layout” tab on Mac 2011 as shown in Figure 1.2).

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Figure 1.2 Freezing the top row

To move quickly to the bottom of the sheet to look at how many transactions you have, you can select a value in one of the populated columns and press Ctrl+↓ (Command+↓ on a Mac). You'll zip right to the last populated cell in that column. In this sheet, the final row is 200. Also, note that using Ctrl/Command to jump around the sheet from left to right works much the same.

If you want to take an average of the sales prices for the night, below the price column, column C, you can jot the following...