Summary and Setup

Good data organization is the foundation of any research project. Most researchers have data in spreadsheets, so it’s the place that many research projects start.

Typically we organize data in spreadsheets in ways that we as humans want to work with the data. However computers require data to be organized in particular ways. In order to use tools that make computation more efficient, such as programming languages like R or Python, we need to structure our data the way that computers need the data. Since this is where most research projects start, this is where we want to start too!

In this lesson, you will learn:

  • Good data entry practices - formatting data tables in spreadsheets
  • How to avoid common formatting mistakes
  • Approaches for handling dates in spreadsheets
  • Basic quality control and data manipulation in spreadsheets
  • Exporting data from spreadsheets

In this lesson, however, you will not learn about data analysis with spreadsheets. Much of your time as a researcher will be spent in the initial ‘data wrangling’ stage, where you need to organize the data to perform a proper analysis later. It’s not the most fun, but it is necessary. In this lesson you will learn how to think about data organization and some practices for more effective data wrangling. With this approach you can better format current data and plan new data collection so less data wrangling is needed.

Prerequisite

Getting Started

Data Carpentry’s teaching is hands-on, so participants are encouraged to use their own computers to ensure the proper setup of tools for an efficient workflow. These lessons assume no prior knowledge of the skills or tools.

To ensure a smooth start to the workshop, please prepare the required data and software by following the Setup instructions provided below.

Prerequisite

For Instructors

If you are teaching this lesson in a workshop, please see the Instructor notes.

Setup instructions

Data

You need to download some files to follow this lesson:

  1. Download the following three files:
  1. Place these 3 files in a folder you can easily find and access on your computer (for instance in a datacarpentry-spreadsheets folder on your Desktop or within your Home folder).

For more information about the dataset and to download it from the original source on Figshare, check out the Social Sciences workshop data page.

Software

To work through this tutorial you will need access to a spreadsheet program. For this you have many options: Microsoft Excel, LibreOffice Calc, Apple Numbers, Google Sheets, Gnumeric, Onlyoffice, WPS office, among others. Commands may differ a bit between programs, but the general ideas for thinking about spreadsheets are the same.

For this lesson, we encourage you to use LibreOffice Calc or Microsoft Excel, as the step-by-step instructions are provided for those programs. If you don’t have Microsoft Excel, you can use LibreOffice. It’s a free, open source spreadsheet program. Here are the instructions to install it: