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

Filtering and Sorting

Now that you have calories in there, say you now want to view only those transactions from the Frozen Treats category. What you want to do then is filter the sheet. To do so, first you select the data in range A1:F200. You can put the cursor in A1 and press Shift+Ctrl+↓ then →. An even easier method is to click the top of column A and hold the click as you mouse over to column F to highlight all six columns.

Then to place auto-filtering on these six columns, you press the Filter button in the Data section of the ribbon. It looks like a gray funnel as shown in Figure 1.12.

image

Figure 1.12 Place auto-filter on a selected range

Once auto-filter is activated, you can click the drop-down menu that appears in cell B1 and choose to show only certain categories (in this case, only the Frozen Treats transactions will be displayed). See Figure 1.13.

image

Figure 1.13 Filtering on category

Once you've filtered, highlighting columns of data allows the summary...