Hands-On Data Visualization

Chapter 2. Strengthen Your Spreadsheet Skills

Before we begin to design data visualizations, it’s important to make sure our spreadsheet skills are up to speed. While teaching this topic, we’ve heard many people describe how they “never really learned” how to use spreadsheet tools as part of their official schooling or workplace training. But spreadsheet skills are vital to learn, not only as incredible time-savers for tedious tasks, but more importantly, to help us discover the stories buried inside our data.

The interactive charts and maps that we’ll construct later in this book are built on data tables, which we typically open with spreadsheet tools, such as Google Sheets, LibreOffice, or Microsoft Excel. Spreadsheets typically contain columns and rows of numerical or textual data, as shown in Figure 2-1. The first row often contains headers, meaning labels describing the data in each column. Also, columns are automatically labeled with letters, and rows with numbers, so that every cell or box in the grid can be referenced, such as C2. When you click on a cell, it may display a formula that automatically runs a calculation that references other cells. Formulas always begin with an equal sign, and may simply add up other cells (such as =C2+C3+C4), or may contain a function that performs a specific operation (such as calculating the average of a range of cells: =average(C2:C7)). Some spreadsheet files contain multiple sheets (sometimes called workbooks), where each tab across ...