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Data Visualization

Learn about best practices and tools to visualize data using charts and maps.

Excel is the Spreadsheet program in the Microsoft Office Suite.

Access to Excel

Mason students and employees can install the latest versions of Excel through Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise.

Consider also these similar free software:

Calc from LibreOffice (desktop)
Sheets from Google Apps (online)

Excel Skills for Data

Formulas with Absolute and Relative Cell References
Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts - Create Summary Statistics
Conditional Formatting - Change colors based on cell values
Power Query - More advanced data manipulation

Basic Skills

Basic Skills

Videos

GCF LearnFree - Excel 2019, or pre-2016 versions (Video)
- Excel Quick Tips
- Formulas in Excel (Video)
Excel Tutorials from Linked In Learning - Free with Mason Login

Written

Data Organization in Spreadsheets by Karl W. Broman & Kara H. Woo - Article in The American Statistician
Data Organization in Spreadsheets for Ecologists by Data Carpentry
Google Sheets 101 by Zapier - Good tips for spreadsheets

More Useful Tutorials

School of Data
- A gentle introduction to cleaning data - 4 sections plus a step-by-step recipe for dealing with most problems with Excel datasets.
- A gentle introduction to exploring and understanding your data - Uses pivot tables in Libre Office's Sheets to look at counts, percentages, and means
- Advanced Spreadsheet formulas - Including Substitute and VLOOKUP
Excel Is Fun! – YouTube videos for advanced users
- Includes advanced topics and provides a link for the files used in videos.
Chapter 5: Manipulating data in spreadsheets (by Martha Stuit; Ch 5 from Creating Data Literate Students)
- Introduces filtering and Pivot tables to summarize data, and reviews the questions that can be answered by doing so.

DDSS Handouts