Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

An Old Tool With Enduring Value: Using Excel To Prepare Data For Analysis, Gregory A. Smith

Faculty Publications and Presentations

Microsoft Excel was first released on the Windows platform 30 years ago and has since become widely used. Although new tools for manipulating, analyzing, and visualizing data are constantly emerging, Excel remains a potent tool—and not just because of newer features. Simple functions such as TRIM, MID, SUBSTITUTE, FIND, ROUNDDOWN, and VLOOKUP can be used to manipulate data sets in powerful ways.

This workshop applies selected functions to realistic library data sets. Demonstrations include:

• deriving time-series categories from date and time stamps
• pre-coding survey comments based on keywords
• dealing with messy data points such as …