[ddj] Good resource for combining data in Excel or Spreadsheets?

[Patrick Maynard]

In case you know that your target audience already has some SQL experience,
it's worth mentioning on this thread that you can also do simple joins
directly in unmodified Excel using a flavor of SQL, should you for some
reason need to do that.

http://superuser.com/questions/420635/how-do-i-join-two-worksheets-in-excel-as-i-would-in-sql

This is not something I would ever be likely to do myself, since Excel was
clearly not designed as an RDBMS, but I tucked the link away in case I'm
ever stuck on a locked-down machine somewhere that has Excel and nothing
else. (And even then, there are probably other alternatives that might be
better in certain situations -- SQL queries running against data stored on
Google Drive, for example.)





On Mon, Oct 27, 2014 at 8:48 AM, Sam Leon <sam.leon at okfn.org> wrote:

> Also, it's only polite to mention CSV reconcile as a great way of
> combining two spreadsheets where things are named inconsistently across
> them. Not a tutorial but a tool that the first respondent (Michael Bauer)
> in fact built. It uses Open Refine so could be a great tool to introduce
> later on in the course:
>
> http://okfnlabs.org/reconcile-csv/
>
> On 27 October 2014 11:54, Claire Miller <claire.l.miller at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi
>>
>> I've got a couple of posts on my blog that might be of interest (
>> http://clairemiller.net/blog/2014/05/data-journalism-for-beginners-cleaning-up-your-data/#comments
>> and
>> http://clairemiller.net/blog/2013/08/data-journalism-necessity-is-the-mother-of-invention/)
>> but they're not really tutorials (there are a few in the book), given I've
>> spent most of this morning trying to clean and combine data using
>> OpenRefine I should probably write some more.
>>
>> Claire
>>
>> On 27 October 2014 10:57, Catherine D'Ignazio <dignazio at media.mit.edu>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi all -
>>>
>>> I teach a data visualization course at Emerson College. We are just
>>> starting to talk about cleaning and combining data from multiple sources
>>> into a single file. We are using OpenRefine for cleaning.
>>>
>>> Does anyone have a good, simple tutorial link or resource for combining
>>> data? Could be in Excel, Google Spreadsheets, or another program if it's
>>> free and easily accessible.
>>>
>>> Catherine
>>>
>>>
>>> /////////////////////////////
>>> Catherine D'Ignazio
>>> Research Affiliate, MIT Media Lab Center for Civic Media
>>> dignazio at mit.edu  ||   @kanarinka   ||   +1 617 501 2441   ||
>>> www.kanarinka.com || http://civic.mit.edu/blog/kanarinka/
>>>
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>
>
> --
>
> *Sam LeonSchool of Data Fellow | skype: samedleon  |  @Noel_Mas
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-- 
-- Patrick

http://baltimoresun.com/datainternship
http://rubyjournos.org
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