Before class
Reading
- "Outsourcing the Pentagon" by Dan Guttman, The Center for Public Integrity, 2004. Presented by Damien Spleeters.
- "Florida's Insurance Nightmare" by Paige St. John, Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 2010 (Pulitzer, 2011). Presented by Andrea Hilbert.
Due Sunday, 5pm
Using the skills you learned over the past two weeks, analyze this spreadsheet and write a 2- to 5-paragraph lede for a story. You don't have to do any other reporting to get this far. (Of course, if you were to write a real story, you'd have to talk with people. This is just the newsworthy findings.)
The spreadsheet has three sheets. The "documentation" sheet tells you what is in the other two and their sources. Review all of the materials under "Resources" below to see the kinds of things you'll have to know how to do. We would expect you to match the two sheets by their common identifier, deal with missing data, and create a pivot table with some comparisons. Please submit your lede and your final spreadsheet to the Courseworks assignment.
Due by the start of class Tuesday
A 250 to 500 word proposal for your story memo. Please see the assignment in Courseworks for more detail
In class
- Reading presentations
- Demonstration of getting data from PDFs
Resources
Videos
- A quick review of importing into Excel -- less than 2 minutes
- Basic filtering
- Advanced filtering
- Ranking, grouping, formula reviews
- Pivot table basics
- Lookups
- date math
Note: A lot of the examples above use the Major League Baseball salary data as their example. Here's a copy of it if you want to try it yourself.
Tools
- Open Refine. This tool helps you cluster records in dirty data and perform rudimentary analysis. For more information, watch these screencasts.
Handouts
- A cheat sheet on keyboard shortcuts and navigation for Windows and Macbook users
- Mary Jo Webster's "My Favorite (Excel) Things" handout, a classic.
- Filtering and pivot tables in Excel. This is for Windows, so it will look a little different than on your screen, but the concepts are the same.
- archived practice datasets and guides on IRE's website. Look particularly at the school reports, car phones (yes, they used to be called that) and pivot tables.