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

Formulas for Locating and Pulling Values

If I didn't assume you at least knew some formulas in Excel (SUM, MAX, MIN, PERCENTILE, and so on), we'd be here all day. And I want to get started. But there are some formulas used a lot in this book that you've probably not used unless you've dug deep into the wonderful world of spreadsheets. These formulas deal with finding a value in a range and returning its location or on the flip side finding a location in a range and returning its value.

I want to cover a few of those on the Calories tab.

Sometimes you want to know the place in line of some element in a column or row. Is it first, second, third? The MATCH formula handles that quite nicely. Below your calorie data, label A18 as Match. You can implement the formula one cell over in B18 to find where in the item list above the word “Hamburger” appears. To use the formula, you supply it a value to look for, a range to search in, and a 0 to force it to give...