Statistical Analysis with Excel For Dummies, 5th Edition

Appendix A

When Your Data Live Elsewhere

IN THIS Appendix

Importing data

Following the process

Getting data from the web

Every so often, you have occasion to analyze data that originate outside your computer. Sometimes, those data are already in spreadsheets. For example, census.gov provides data in Excel files. In that case, you just download the data.

It’s not always that straightforward — but it’s still pretty easy, thanks to Microsoft 365. First, you open the Data tab. Then, in the Get & Transform Data area, you select a general category (like Web, Text, or CSV). You navigate to the target and then follow some steps in a dialog box to load the data into a worksheet — and that’s pretty much it.

I illustrate by importing data from the web. With the Data tab open, in the Get & Transform Data area on the left, I select From Web. Figure A-1 shows you what I mean.

In this example, I import the well-known Iris data set from Wikipedia. It’s well-known because many aspiring data scientists work with this data set to acquire skills in machine learning. But that’s a story for another day, and for another book. (Shameless plug: That other book is R Projects For Dummies, written by me and ...