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Data Management and Databases Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Inciter
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Data Cleaning in Excel 101, Part 2: Splitting Up Cell Contents Into Multiple Columns

Posted on April 21, 2020
in Data Management and Databases
by Kristen Halsey and Jacob Joseph
3 Comments

Having the right data in the right columns to meet specific requirements for your analysis plays a major role in the data cleaning process. Over the next 3 parts in our Data Cleaning in Excel series, we’ll show you how to solve common issues by utilizing both standard and Excel’s powerful “Flash Fill” shortcut. Part 2 focuses on splitting data from one cell to multiple cells. Part 3 covers the opposite: combining data from multiple columns into one column. Part 4 showcases some incredibly useful and time-saving things you can do with the mystical powers of Excel’s “Flash Fill” function.Classic Methods and an Introduction to Excel’s Magical Mind-Reading Shortcut “Flash Fill”While straightening up datasets, you may encounter cells containing text strings of data that need to be organized into multiple...

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Data Cleaning in Excel 101, Part 1: Three methods for removing blank rows (without deleting anything important!)

Posted on April 14, 2020
in , Data Management and Databases
by Kristen Halsey and Jacob Joseph
3 Comments

At Inciter, we use many tools to clean data. Google Sheets and Excel are widely available and powerful tools for basic data cleaning of small to medium data sets. In this series, we will describe different methods for cleaning data that have common problems such as blank rows, duplicates, multiple values in one column, data split into too many columns, leading zeroes, numbers that don’t act like numbers, basic data recoding, and comparing two versions of a spreadsheet. Method #1: Sort them out.Excel’s column sort function won’t order blank cells. If it makes sense to organize your data by a certain column, (i.e. date from newest to oldest), you can sort the entire sheet and watch the completely blank rows fall off. Just be sure all of your data is...

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Data Maturity Part II: How Grown Up Are You?

Posted on February 3, 2020
in Data Management and Databases, Technology and Customer Service
by Taj Carson
0 Comments

Data Maturity StagesIn Part I of this blog series, I introduced the concept of data maturity, its importance to organizations, and steps for becoming data mature. Today, we’ll tackle the ways in which organizations can be thought of as existing in different stages of data maturity and how you may move through them. Particularly relative to reporting, knowing where you are on the data maturity scale will help you identify the right approach and the right tools to move forward. Early Phases: Piloting and Building Phase I: Piloting (Infancy)Your data is new and cute, but you can’t really leave it alone when you go out for dinner. You may be collecting some basic data, but you haven’t created a data strategy and made clear decisions about what you are collecting and why....

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Data Maturity Part I

Posted on January 9, 2020
in , Data Management and Databases, Technology and Customer Service
by Taj Carson
1 Comment

I was introduced to the term “data maturity” by Karen Graham, Maddie Grant, and Jenn Taylor at their 2019 GoodTech Fest presentation. (If you don’t know about GoodTech Fest, check out my blog post on it here and consider going in 2020! It’s a great, reality-based conference about measuring what matters in the nonprofit sector.)I’ve been thinking a lot about this idea of data maturity, and how we can help organizations build capacity to provide data for themselves and to funders. I think about this all the time, of course, but data maturity provides another, very useful concept to hang some ideas on. It got me thinking about why some of our clients seem able to collect and use data better than others, and also about what it takes for...

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