Well-formed Data - Part 4: Missing Data

How often do you get data that needs to be charted or graphed only to find out some of the data’s missing?  We see it all the time.  However, just because it’s missing, doesn’t mean you can ignore it.  You need to know how to make it consistent, how to deal with it if it is missing, or sometimes even how to recover it.  In this 9:12 video, the fourth in our series on well-formed data for charts & graphs, we cover:

types of missing data
differences between incomplete, space, blank/null, and 0 data
dealing with missing text
dealing with missing numbers
dealing with implied data

Let [...]

Well-formed Data - Part 3: Normalization

Our lives are made up almost exclusively of relationships and that includes data.  In fact, it’s hard to think of examples of data that doesn’t involve a relationship.  Customers (hopefully) have many Orders.  Companies have multiple employees.  People (hopefully) have multiple friends, who also have multiple friends, and may even share some of each others friends.  People may have multiple phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and so on. 

Admittedly, this may be the geekiest of topics on creating well-formed data.  In part 3 of our 4 part series, we discuss one way to make sure your data follows the ”1 Concept per Row” [...]

Well-formed Data – Part 2: Concatenation & Extraction

Continuing our series on preparing data for analysis & visualization, we’ve just released the next video on concatenation and extraction.  The ability to break data apart and put it back together in new ways is essential to preparing data.  By storing data at the lowest sensible level, it can be used separately or combined with other data for interesting analysis and visualization.  In this practical video, we discuss 6 key Excel functions for extraction including left(), mid(), right(), search(), len(), and trunc().

Check out this 9:57 video to learn how to take the next step in preparing your data for analysis [...]

Well-formed Data - Part 1: Consistency

Data visualization and analysis are powerful tools for discovering and communicating stories held in your data.  However, before most of today’s data visualization tools can be used effectively, the data must be cleaned, organized and prepared.  Over the next 4 videos, I’ll be discussing how to prepare your data to be visualized.  The first step in the process is consistency.  Consistency is made up of 4 principles:

One Concept per Row
One Data Type per Column
One Format per Data Type
Using the Lowest Sensible Level

Check out this 9:43 video to begin the most important step in preparing your data:

In the next 3 videos, we’ll continue the discussion [...]