Tag Archives: software engineering daily

Dear Analyst #66: How to update and add new data to a PivotTable with ramen ratings data

PivotTables have been on my mind lately (you’ll see why in a couple weeks). An issue you may face with PivotTables is how to change the source data for a PivotTable you’ve meticulously set up. You have some new data being added to your source data, and you have to change the PivotTable source data […]

Dear Analyst #36: What The Economist’s model for the 2020 presidential election can teach us about forecasting

On a recent episode of The Intelligence, The data editor at The Economist spoke about a U.S. presidential election forecast their publication is working on. I looked more into their model and discuss some of the features and parameters of their model and what makes their forecast unique. Some of the techniques used in The […]

Dear Analyst Episode 25: Structuring data challenge (denormalize data) with Get and Transform

This episode is based on a video and Tweet posted by Mr. Excel (Bill Jelen). Bill discusses an Excel challenge someone emailed him about regarding how to “transform” a badly structured table of data into a structure that makes it easy to do PivotTables and other downstream analysis. Interestingly, I received a ticket from a […]

Revisiting Calculating Average Trends Across Time Periods in Spreadsheets

In this episode, I discuss how to calculate trends over time in Excel for the purposes for forecasting future values. I reference an old post about calculating trends where someone recently left a comment about the counter-intuitiveness on calculating averages of changes in your values. In order to follow along with this episode, I would […]

What it’s like teaching a week-long online data analytics course

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to teach a week-long data analytics course through General Assembly. The course was taught entirely online using Zoom. I discuss some of the topics the students learned in the class, and what the experience was like teaching an online class in real time. The topics we covered […]