The World of spreadsheets and simple graphing
From Help Wiki
Spreadsheets
- As explained by Wikipedia
- Best application for data gathering/collection
- Easiest entry into "application development" --you don't even have to be a developer/programmer
The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly
The Good
- Spreadsheets is a low entry point for an application framework, in the same way that WordPress is a website framework
- You don't have to be a developer/programmer
The Bad
- Spreadsheets are used to make applications
- You don't have to be a developer/programmer
- Complex spreadsheets suffer from errors; become difficult to troubleshoot
The Ugly
The World of Spreadsheets
- Gnumeric most powerful spreadsheet program
- Single editor environment
- Size Limit: Max rows: 16,777,216; Max Columns: 16,384; Max Cells: 274,877,906,944
- Project doesn't provide Windows binaries; lag for latest version to be ported to Windows or Macintosh
- Libre Calc
- Single editor environment
- Size Limit: each sheet can have a maximum of 1,048,576 rows and a maximum of 1024 columns.
- Each document has a size limit of 4 GB
- Google Sheets
- Multi-editor environment
- Size Limit Up to 2 million cells
- Microsoft Excel
- Single editor environment
- x32 bit vs. x64 bit
- Size Limit: 1,048,576 rows by 16,384 columns
- x32 bit: Each document limited to 2GB
- x64 bit: Each document limited by system physical memory
- Microsoft Excel Online in Office 365
- Multi-editor environment --Maximum of 5 concurrent editors
- Size Limit: 250 MB
Tidy Data
- Each variable forms a column,
- Each observation forms a row,
- Each table (or file) stores data about one class of experimental unit.
Basics
- relative vs. absolute cell reference
- dragging cells to auto-fill
Tips & Tricks
Formulas
- With complex formulas, work backwards, or right to left:
- LEFT(ROUND(SUM(A:A))/COUNT(A:A),3)
Graphing (Charts)
The Top Ten Worst Graphs
Learning from others mistakes
The Top Ten Worst Graphs
Anatomy of a Graph/Chart
- Graph/Chart type
- Column
- Bar
- Pie
- Area
- Line
- XY Scatter
- Bubble
- Net
- Boxplot
- Mixed
- Chart/Graph Title
- Chart/Graph Subtitle
- Chart/Graph X-Axis Label
- Chart/Graph Y-Axis Label
- Chart/Graph Legend
Tips & Tricks
- To print individual charts, select the chart, then press CTRL + P, this bring up print properties just for the selected chart.
Data Manipulation
- Swap X Y or switch row/column
- "Select Data..." from Chart filter
Color
Visualization Data
TED TALK's
- David McCandless: The beauty of data visualization
- Hans Rosling
- "let my dataset change your mindset"
- Manuel Lima: A visual history of human knowledge
Visualization
- Information Is Beautiful
- Gapminder --requires Adobe Flash plugin :-(
Shout out to DuckDuckGo search engine for bursting my filter bubble
