Take a Buzzfeed quiz that promises to tell you how smart you are, and when it says you are a budding Einstein, you nod, smile, and think about how insightful and talented the people who designed the quiz must be. And if that same quiz tells you to go back to living under the bridge…
There are so many beautiful ways to look at data, and the best of them paint a picture the numbers alone might not show so readily. From classics such as Snow’s cholera map or Minard’s Napoleon map, to your basic spreadsheet charts, entire specialties are devoted to depicting information in a useful way. So what…
OK, nothing about fruit here, but let’s talk about rolling up data. When you spend the time and resources to gather data for something you’re doing, it’s a giant hassle to have to go back and do it again, so always collect your data as granularly as possible. There are constraints of time and money…
Before you do anything with your data, whether it’s for your own work, or something your team will see, take a look at it first and ask yourself: “Is this reasonable?” Just scroll through your spreadsheet — summarize or use pivot tables if you have a lot of data — and this can alert you…
Many of you deal with seasonality in your data. Maybe it’s busier in the months when snowbirds are here or slower when everyone is vacationing in the summer. If you’re like many others, you are smart enough to avoid comparing consecutive months because of this variation, and often all you can do is look at…