Dear Analyst 123

Dear Analyst #123: Telling data stories about rugby and the NBA with Ben Wylie

When you think of data journalism, you might think of The New York Times’ nifty data visualizations and the Times’ embrace of data literacy for all their journalists. Outside of The New York Times, I haven’t met anyone who does data journalism and data storytelling full-time until I spoke with Ben Wylie. Ben is the […]

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Dear Analyst #122: Designing an online version of Excel to help Uber China compete with DiDi on driver incentives with Matt Basta

There are only so many ways to make Excel “fun.” If you’ve been following this blog/podcast, stories about the financial modeling competition and spreadsheet errors that lead to catastrophic financial loss are stories that make a 1980s tool somewhat interesting to read and listen to. There are numerous tutorials and TikTok influencers who teach Excel […]

Dear Analyst 121

Dear Analyst #121: Fabricating and skewing Excel survey data about honesty with behavioral economists Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino

One of the more popular courses you could take at my college to fulfill the finance major requirements was Behavioral Finance. The main “textbook” was Inefficient Markets and we learned about how there are qualitative ways to value a security beyond what the efficient market hypothesis purports. During the financial crisis of 2008, psychology professor […]

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Dear Analyst #120: Marketing attribution, sensitivity models, and building data infrastructure from the ground up with Zach Wilner

Data analytics and business analytics are still relatively new areas of study (in terms of academics). The subject borders business and computer science. When I went to school, the only data analytics classes available were special electives offered through our school’s continuing education department. In this episode, I spoke with Zach Wilner who currently leads […]

Dear Analyst #119

Dear Analyst #119: Developing the holy “grail” model at Lyft, user journeys, and hidden analytics with Sean Taylor

Future Dear Analyst episodes will get more sporadic since, well, life gets in the way. Unfortunately curiosity (in most cases) doesn’t pay the bills. Nevertheless, when I come across an idea or person that I think is worth sharing/learning more about, I’ll try my best to post. In this episode, I interview the Chief Scientist […]

Dear Analyst #118

Dear Analyst #118: Uncovering trends and insights behind Facebook News Feed, Reels, and Recommendations using data science with Akos Lada

No, this isn’t an episode about how Facebook’s algorithm and feed works. The data science function is popping up in companies small and large given the amount of data swimming around. No other company understand the power and influence that data science can have on the customer experience than Facebook (Meta, to be exact). Akos […]

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Dear Analyst #117: New 2023 Google Sheets functions for data manipulation that already exist in Excel

The Google Workspace team announced a slew of Google Sheets functions a few months ago (February 2023). These functions look familiar and that’s because Microsoft Excel released most of them two years ago. I never had a chance to play around with the new functions in Excel since I don’t have the latest Office 365 […]

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Dear Analyst Episode #116: Will Microsoft’s AI Copilot for Excel replace the need for analysts?

This news is a bit old but I figured it’s juicy enough to talk about its future implications on Excel and artificial intelligence in general. Mid-March 2023, Microsoft announced Copilot, it’s artificial intelligence bet that will supposedly change the way we work. The video discusses how Copilot integrates with Office 365 and all your Microsoft […]

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Dear Analyst #115: How to count the number of colored cells or formatted cells in Google Sheets

Counting the number of colored cells or formatted cells in Google Sheets or Excel seems like it should be a basic operation. Unfortunately after much Googling, it doesn’t seem as easy as it looks. I came across this Mr. Excel forum thread where someone asks how to count the number of rows where there is […]

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Dear Analyst Episode #114: How a small real estate investment company uses modern data and cloud tools to make data-driven decisions

When you think of data pipelines, data warehouses, and ETL tools, you may be thinking about some large enterprise that is collecting and processing data from IoT devices or from a mobile app. These companies are using tools from AWS and Google Cloud to build these complex workflows to get data to where it needs […]