Paul McFedries - Excel Data Analysis For Dummies

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The world is bursting at the seams with data. It’s on our computers, it’s in our networks, it’s on the web. Some days, it seems to be in the very air itself, borne on the wind. But here’s the thing: No one actually cares about data. A collection of data — whether it resides on your PC or some giant server somewhere — is really just a bunch of numbers and text, dates and times. No one cares about data because data doesn’t mean anything. Data isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? Knowledge is cool. Insight is cool.

So how do you turn data into knowledge? How do you tweak data to generate insight? You need to organize that data, and then you need to sort it, filter it, run calculations on it, and summarize it. In a word, you need to analyze the data.

Now for the good news: If you have (or can get) that data into Excel, you have a giant basket of data-analysis tools at your disposal. Excel really seems to have been made with data analysis in mind, because it offers such a wide variety of features and techniques for organizing, manipulating, and summarizing just about anything that resides in a worksheet. If you can get your data into Excel, it will help you turn that data into knowledge and insight.

This book takes you on a tour of Excel’s data-analysis tools. You learn everything you need to know to make your data spill its secrets and to uncover your data’s hidden-in-plain-sight wisdom. Best of all, if you already know how to perform the basic Excel chores, you don’t need to learn any other fancy-schmancy Excel techniques to get started in data analysis. Sweet? You bet.

This book contains 16 chapters (and a bonus appendix), but that doesn’t mean that you have to, as the King says gravely in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, “Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: Then stop.” If you’ve done a bit of data-analysis work in the past, please feel free to dip into the book wherever it strikes your fancy. The chapters all present their data-analysis info and techniques in readily digestible, bite-sized chunks, so you can certainly graze your way through this book.

However, if you’re brand spanking new to data analysis — particularly if you’re not even sure what data analysis even is — no problem: I’m here to help. To get your data-analysis education off to a solid start, I highly recommend reading the book’s first three chapters to get some of the basics down cold. From there, you can travel to more advanced territory, safe in the knowledge that you’ve got some survival skills to fall back on.

This book consists of several hundred pages. Do I expect you to read every word on every page? Yes, I do. Just kidding! No, of course I don’t. Entire sections — heck, maybe even entire chapters — might contain information that’s not relevant to what you do. That’s fine and my feelings won’t be hurt if you skim through (or — who’s kidding whom? — skip over) those parts of the book.

If time (or attention) is short, what else might you want to ignore? Okay, in many places throughout the book I provide step-by-step instructions to complete some task. Each of those steps includes some bold type that gives you the basic instruction. In many cases, however, below that bold text I offer supplementary information to flesh out or extend or explain the bold instruction. Am I just showing off how much I know about all this stuff? Yes, sometimes. Do you have to read these extended instructions? Nope. Read the bold stuff, for sure, but feel free to skip the details if they seem unnecessary or unimportant.

This book is for people who are new (or relatively new) to Excel data analysis. That doesn’t mean, however, that the book is suitable to people who have never used a PC, Microsoft Windows, or even Excel. So first I assume not only that you have a PC running Microsoft Windows but also that you’ve had some experience with both. (For the purposes of this book, that just means you know how to start and switch between programs.) I also assume that your PC has a recent version of Excel installed. What does “recent” mean? Well, this book is based on Excel 2021, but you should be fine if you’re running Excel 365, Excel 2019, Excel 2016, or even Excel 2013.

As I said before, I do not assume that you’re an Excel expert, but I do assume that you know at least the following Excel basics:

Creating, saving, opening, and switching between workbooks

Creating and switching between worksheets

Finding and running commands on the Ribbon

Entering numbers, text, dates, times, and formulas into worksheet cells

Working with Excel’s basic worksheet functions

Like other books in the For Dummies series, this book uses icons, or little margin pictures, to flag things that don’t quite fit into the flow of the chapter discussion. Here are the icons that I use:

This icon marks text that contains some things that are useful or important enough that you’d do well to store the text somewhere safe in your memory for later recall.

This icon marks text that contains some for-nerds-only technical details or explanations that you’re free to skip.

This icon marks text that contains a shortcut or an easier way to do things, which I hope will make your life — or, at least, the data-analysis portion of your life — more efficient.

This icon marks text that contains a friendly but unusually insistent reminder to avoid doing something. You have been warned.

Examples: This book’s sample Excel workbooks can be found by going to www.dummies.com/go/exceldataanalysisfd5e or at my website: www.paulmcfedries.com .

Cheat Sheet: To locate this book's cheat sheet, go to www.dummies.com and search for Excel Data Analysis For Dummies. See the cheat sheet for info on Excel database functions, Boolean expressions, and important statistical terms.