Don’t you hate it when you are working with many fields and you want to filter a particular field, so you apply auto filter on the all fields, but you find out that the field you were working on is gone from your sight and you see A1 cell. I did. Not anymore.
Solution: Simply hit the left or the right arrow key, and it will take you to the left or the right cell of the field you were working on.
My gripe about graduate school is that the school focused on well-established software and never embraced nor encouraged open-source software. If they had taught, or at least introduced, these following open-source software, it would have helped us immensely to produce the best looking reports with great data analysis. We, however, had to struggle with SAS/Excel to get the graphs and analysis needed, and then spend hours to perform formatting in Word. Why they didn’t teach us:
summary. Any software that can do produce the following, just by giving summary(iris) command has to be great:
Summary produced by R of the iris data set
In my thesis, I had plenty of equations, and every time I made some significant changes, MS Word happily would turn those equations into empty white boxes — and then I had to rewrite them. In retrospect, I find it ridiculous that I was entering citations manually. So every time I added a new reference, I would manually change the bibliography page and the page where I cited that reference. With LaTex, it is just a breeze to do all this.
Descriptive stats, Box-plots, normal curves, neural network, charts with LaTex equations, and a lot of more stuff, all could be easily done using R, and the best part is “repeatability.” With simple commands, you could export all the charts as images for various data sets or for various training algorithms. No sweat! Try that with Excel. (I did some years ago).
Ever since I read the book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, by Edward R. Tufte, I am captivated by the idea of creating good design while doing data analysis or dashboard building. Although Excel 2007 charts are much nicer than its previous births, I have started disliking Excel charts. I am even developing an eye for picking out the bad information pixels. Apart from Tufte’s books, these books have helped me immensely:
Administrators/executives neither have the time nor the patience to understand complicated data mining algorithms and its results, and when they don’t understand them most probably they will never go in “production.” Simple, yet informative, designs and charts have better chances of going in production, which I am sure every data miner longs for.
I found a course web-site on Information Visualization: http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~ihaka/120/lectures.html
I was trying to enable an add-in for Excel 2007, and I kept getting this error:
Access to the VB project is not trusted
You can turn this message off by going to Developer tab in the ribbon and then clicking on the Macro security button, and checking the check box for “Trust access to the VBA project object model.”
A word of caution: be wary of the add-ins/projects that need VBA access. Don’t allow any project/add-in with VBA access, unless you know its exact purpose or the author of that project.
Counting text in a range is easy. For example, if you would like count how many times “text” is in a specified range (named data), you can write something like this:
=COUNTIF(data,"*text*")
This formula will give you the count of all the cells where Excel found “text” at any place.
But let’s say you want to count wildcard characters in a range, then you can write something like this:
=SUM(IF(NOT(ISERR(FIND("*",data))),1,0))
This formula should be entered as an array formula with Ctrl + Shift + Enter. Usually, wildcard can be “escaped” using a tilde (~), but the FIND function doesn’t understand wildcard characters like the SEARCH function does.
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