These slides are by Steve Doig, journalism professor at ASU's Cronkite School and Pulitzer-winning journalist. The slides are from Doig's workshop Excel for Journalists, part of the School of Data Journalism 2013 at the International Journalism Festival, Perugia.

1. Workshop data

2. Database Journalism:
Finding the smoking gun
Steve Doig
Arizona State University
steve.doig@asu.edu

3. Why use “data”?

4. Precision journalism

5. What is “data”?

6. Information -- but not data
 Steve Doig is a 65-year-old professor
who teaches at Arizona State University
in Phoenix.

7. Now it’s data!
Last
name
First
name Age Title City
Doig Steve 65 Professor Phoenix
Jones Bob 45 Editor Sydney
Smith Tom 34 Reporter Melbourn
e

8. Getting data
 WOBBING.EU
 Wet Openbaarheid van Bestuur (Open
Government Act)
 ISTAT.IT
 Request from agencies
 Build your own?

9. History lesson

10. Recent “big data” stories
 Education cheating (USA Today)
 UK MPs’ spending (Guardian)
 Medicare fraud (CalWatch)
 EU fishing subsidies (ICIJ)

11. More examples
 Budgets and taxes
 Crime patterns
 School test scores
 Auto accidents
 Demographic change
 Pet licenses
 Air quality
 Sports statistics

12. Data journalism tools
 Analysis:
 Spreadsheet (Excel)
 Database (Access)
 Mapping (ArcMap)
 SPSS, SAS
 Text editor
 Social network
analysis (NodeXL)
 Presentation:
 Google fusion tables
 Ruby, Django, perl,
python, et al.
 Photoshop

13. Patterns and outliers

14. Data power tool: MS Excel

15. A blank spreadsheet

16. What Excel can do
 Import data from many formats
 Sort data by one or more variables
 Filter data to show only selected rows
 Transform data using functions and
formulas
 Summarize data into categories

17. Importing data
 Common formats
 *.xls (or *.xlsx)
 Fixed-width text
 Delimited text (comma, tab, etc)
 *.dbf files (old dBase)
 HTML tables
 Data Import Wizard will help

18. Delimited text example

19. Sorting a table

20. Now it’s sorted

21. Filtering: Data…Filter…Autofilter

22. Pick a category…

23. …and see just that

24. Transforming data
 Math functions
 Add, subtract, multiply, divide
 Average, median, maximum, minimum
 Date/Time functions
 Day of week, days between
 Text functions
 Extract parts of text strings
 Search and replace text

25. Function Wizard (ƒx)

26. Function Wizard (ƒx)

27. Summarizing data

28. Example data

29. Pivot table example
 Data: Region, province, population,
murders, etc.
 Question: “How many murders occurred
in each region?”
 Visualize the piece of paper that would
answer the question

30. Building a pivot table

31. Pivot table

32. Sorted pivot table

33. Data journalism resources

34. DataJournalismHandbook.org

36. Publications

37. DOMANDE?