Learning Objectives

Following this assignment students should be able to:

• Describe best practices for organizing data so computers can make the best use of data sets.
• Describe best practices for data entry and formatting in spreadsheets.
• Recognize and resolve common spreadsheet formatting problems
• Describe the advantages of alternative date formatting in spreadsheets.
• Demonstrate best practices for entering dates in spreadsheets.
• Store spreadsheet data in universal file formats.

Reading

The material below is developed as part of the Data Carpentry: Ecology Curriculum. While a majority of the course will focus on R, Excel serves a valuable role in data science, and you will learn how to work with Excel and R during the course.

• Introduction
• Formatting data tables in Spreadsheets
• Formatting problems
• Dates as data
• Exporting data

Lecture Notes

Slidedeck

Tuesday Audio

Download Audio: M4A

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Exercises

Week 1 “Quiz” on Canvas

Summary Sheets Due Thursday in Class

This is a sheet of paper where you use a writing instrument to create a mindmap / cheat sheet.