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

Mon Oct 27 13:27:04 UTC 2014

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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>>
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>
>
> --
>
> *Sam LeonSchool of Data Fellow | skype: samedleon  |  @Noel_Mas
> <https://twitter.com/noel_mas>The Open Knowledge Foundation
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-- 
-- Patrick

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