Excel's greatest strength -- and its greatest weakness -- is the ease of users to manipulate the basic data. Done well and the capability affords flexibility; done poorly and you are left with …
Pivoting on Text in R (vs. Excel)
This post follows a previous tutorial on pivoting on text in Excel. In this post I will reproduce the exercise in R. This way you begin to see the similarities and differences of the program and begin …
Pivoting on Text in Excel: Awards by Player PivotTable
This post is inspired by a Mr. Excel tutorial on using "text instead of numbers in a Pivot Table." Our goal is to create a Pivot-Table like report that creates a comma-separated list …
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How Fiction Makes Me a Better Analyst
It is my hope that this blog goes beyond simple tips and tricks into helping people become more fluent in data and, by consequence, innovation. One of my first and still favorite blog posts was on …
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Calculating Games Behind: “Max If” in R and Excel
In a recent post I walked through baseball's Pythagorean theorem in Excel. I am finding baseball statistics a great post subject for a variety of reasons: it's freely available, it can be analyzed in …
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Baseball’s Pythagorean Expectation in Excel
Baseball fan? Excel fan? Of course there's a way to combine our nation's two pastimes. Michael Lewis's Moneyball popularized Bill James and the "sabermetrics" school of applying statistical methods …
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