January 2006
Intermediate to advanced
442 pages
12h 3m
English
Content preview from Excel Scientific and Engineering CookbookBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 3. Collecting and Cleaning Up Data
Introduction
Chances are you’re going to have to deal with data that’s not already in the form of an Excel file. This data may be standard scientific and engineering data (such as element properties or thermodynamic tables), or it could be the results of other computer simulations (such as computation fluid dynamics results or galaxy formation simulation results), or it could be experimental data obtained from any of a wide variety of scientific and engineering measurements. In many cases such data would be in the form of text files that could be imported into Excel for further analysis. Text files are common because they are universal, they are easy to generate in custom programs, and you don’t have to have specialized software to read them. Still other data that you may want to process in Excel could reside in nontext files such as database files. This chapter will show you how to import data into Excel from these and other sources. Further, I’ll show you how to massage that data once it’s in Excel, making it easier to manipulate and analyze.
3.1. Importing Data from Text Files
Problem
You have some data you’d like to analyze in Excel but it’s located in a separate text file.
Solution
Open the text file in Excel using File → Open....
Discussion
Excel is capable of reading many different file formats, not just Excel spreadsheet files. Opening a text file is very much like opening a spreadsheet file: simply use File → Open... (or use the shortcut ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.