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Tom Torok (NYT) writes: After years of looking down my nose at Excel because of its limitations, I have to say that I'm very impressed with Excel 2010 when used with a free Microsoft add-in called PowerPivot. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/download-powerpivot-HA101959985.aspx In a PowerPivot tutorial (link below), I imported eight tables  from several sources and joined them - yes, you can join relational data. It uses some magical data compression that allows for lightning fast sorts, filters and calculated fields. The largest table in the tutorial has about 2 million rows. A calculated field on that table took seconds. A did a pivot table on the table and the answers appeared as soon as I selected the fields. In one of  the training videos (http://www.powerpivot.com/) an MS guy works with a 101 million-record table on his laptop. It's really amazing. http://powerpivotsdr.codeplex.com/ If you install, be sure to read the prerequisites or you'll be installing and uninstalling both PowerPivot and Excel. I'm running it on a 32-bit XP machine (it won't run on a 64-bit XP but will work on Windows 7 64-bit). The tutorial is for a Windows 7 setup, but there are items in the menu bar that match the reference to the tutorial's ribbon. I noticed that if I call up an xlsx by double clicking on a file in Windows Explorer that PowerPivot is not enabled in the ribbon. If you call up a file from within Excel 2010 everything works as advertised.Regards, TT  

Download Download your Esri Maps for Office. Esri Maps for Office requires Office 2010 or later. Esri Maps for Office Add-In (x86) 32-bit (70MB) Esri Maps for Office Add-In (x64) 64-bit (70MB) Download the version of Esri Maps for Office that matches the bit version of Microsoft Office 2010 you have installed, not the version of your operating system (OS). If you are not sure, open Excel (or other Office application), click the File tab, and select Help. In the About Microsoft Excel section on the right, the version information states whether the Microsoft Office 2010 installation is 32-bit or 64-bit. Once your download is complete, open Excel.

This looks to be a very valuable tool.

Solving the Pie Chris Gemignani December 14, 2006 By: Chris Gemignani Last week I challenged you to reproduce this alternative to pie charts in Excel. I promised a screencast to show how it's done. http://juiceanalytics.com/writing/2006/12/square-pie-screencast/ Square Pie Eighteen people answered the call with nearly three dozen different solutions. Click here to watch the screencast showing how to accomplish the two most popular solutions; filling cells with conditional formatting and pushing the column chart to extremes. If you want to look at the source,Clint Ivy produced an excellent version of the cell filling approach.

Perception: Gestalt Laws Home → Data visualization for Excel users → Perception: Gestalt Laws Every chart starts with a table. We transcribe this table into a visual representation of distances between data points: the "origin chart". That's when our "eye-brain system" starts making assumptions. It assumes that data points are somewhat related, even if they are not:

Beautiful but Terrible Pyramids: Tableau Edition by Jorge Camoes on July 12, 2011 Well, here is my first chart in Tableau, finally! After publishing my experiments with population pyramids (using Excel), I thought I could try Tableau Public with the same dataset from the US Census Bureau. Here is the result. I never really played before with Tableau Public and it took my less than an hour to upload the data and make this chart, without reading a manual or watching a tutorial (changing line colors was the hard part). It says a lot about its usability. http://www.excelcharts.com/blog/beautiful-but-terrible-pyramids-tableau-edition/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+JCCharts+%28Excel+Charts+Blog%29

Select your favorite nation. Note how this could be used to illustrate population changes for a single nation over time or nation-to-nation comparisons.

Understanding how to clean data is an important skill every reporter needs. Demographic, financial and other data is available on a city, county, state and national level in the United States. But understanding how to take a large data file and distill it into a usable form can be daunting. In this tutorial, you'll learn how spreadsheets work, basic data-cleaning workflow and how to use formulas and functions to clean data. This is a general tutorial and it doesn't delve deeply into one program. We'll use Microsoft Excel but most of the same techniques work in Google Spreadsheets and other programs.

By Dan Nguyen Reactions to Osama bin Laden's death: Female and non-U.S. residents more ambivalent. Via the NYT Reactions Matrix By Dan Nguyen | Published: May 9, 2011 This (totally not-double-checked) analysis is a riff off of the excellent New York Times visualization (The Death of a Terrorist: A Turning Point?) of how people reacted to Osama bin Laden's death. In the days following the news, the Times asked online readers to not only write their thoughts on bin Laden's killing, but put a mark on a scatterplot graph that best described their reaction. The Times used the data to show the continuum of reactions from everyone who participated. I wanted to see how reactions differed across geographical location and gender. Includes details of his methodology (and a bit on that of the original NYT graphic)

Zanran helps you to find 'semi-structured' data on the web. This is the numerical data that people have presented as graphs and tables and charts. For example, the data could be a graph in a PDF report, or a table in an Excel spreadsheet, or a barchart shown as an image in an HTML page. This huge amount of information can be difficult to find using conventional search engines, which are focused primarily on finding text rather than graphs, tables and bar charts. Put more simply: Zanran is Google for data. Language. English only please... for now. Phrase search. You can use double quotes to make phrases (e.g. "mobile phones"). Booleans. You can use a plus '+' to make a word mandatory, or a minus '-' to exclude it (e.g. +gas -oil production) Vocabulary. We have only limited synonyms - please try different words in your query. And we don't spell-check ... yet.

OpenData Open Data

10 ways to screw up your spreadsheet design Recommend +21 Votes 36 Comments 46Share more + By Susan Harkins June 23, 2011, 8:25 AM PDT Takeaway: How you set up a spreadsheet determines its efficiency, usability, and reliability. Avoiding these pitfalls during the design phase will save you a million headaches. Wrong references, missing values, and invalid data aren't the only things that will ruin a spreadsheet. The development process starts before you do a thing, while you're planning the design. These types of mistakes are worse than bugs because you can't troubleshoot them. All you can do is start over. Here are 10 mistakes to avoid early in the process, when you're still in the decision-making phase.

A good list and read down into the comments; additional good tips there.