Group items tagged

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.

Mapping Sheets Another favorite Google Drive add-on of mine is definitely Mapping Sheets. With this add-on, you can make better use of any geographical data you may have in your spreadsheet. If you've ever wanted an easy way to quickly plot locations from your data onto a Google Map, this is it. drive addons8   5 Google Drive Add ons You Need To Use Using it is ridiculously easy. Just make sure you've got a list of addresses and other related data in your sheet, and then trigger this add-on. You'll see a form where you tell it what columns in your sheet to use for creating the map. drive addons9   5 Google Drive Add ons You Need To Use Once you submit it, the add-on creates the map right in the sheet for you so that you have a useful visualization of all of that data.

Who can use Twiangulate? Job Seekers Looking for an "in" at a company or trying to learn which tweeps might influence the hiring manager or boss? Or looking for tweeps at target companies or industries in a certain location? Twiangulate has you covered. Journalists Want to find hidden relationships or linchpin players in an industry? Maybe you're looking for sources in a microniche? Or who's most followed at a conference? Twiangulate does it all. Tech Junkies Want to know who your most influential Twitter followers are? Love social network mapping? Want to know when two tweeps start following the same person? Twiangulate!

"The Open Data Handbook This handbook discusses the legal, social and technical aspects of open data. It can be used by anyone but is especially designed for those seeking to open up data. It discusses the why, what and how of open data - why to go open, what open is, and the how to 'open' data. To get started, you may wish to look at the Introduction. You can navigate through the report using the Table of Contents (see sidebar or below). We warmly welcome comments on the text and will incorporate feedback as we go forward. We also welcome contributions or suggestions for additional sections and areas to examine."

Searchable Map Template with Google Fusion Tables Turn a spreadsheet in to a searchable map You want to put your data on a searchable, filterable map. This is a free, open source tool to help you do it. Features clean, full screen layout new mobile and tablet friendly using responsive design address search (with variable radius) geolocation (find me!) new RESTful URLs for sharing searches results count (using Google's Fusion Tables API) ability to easily add additional search filters (checkboxes, sliders, etc) all done with HTML, CSS and Javascript - no server side code required Technologies used Google Fusion Tables (useful resources) Google Maps API V3 jQuery jQuery Address Twitter Bootstrap Note: This template is now supports the Fusion Tables v1 API. For more info on this, see their migration guide

Redliner, a recent addition to the SaaS field, takes the concept one step further. A "next generation" online collaboration tool, Redliner goes beyond establishing a shared work space "in the cloud"-where individuals can access, edit and comment on documents-and adds innovative workflow features that actually get important documents completed faster. Surpassing the capabilities of current online word processors, such as Google™ Docs, Zoho® Writer and Adobe® Buzzword®, Redliner abolishes the grunt work inherent in the document collaboration process. When several individuals are working on a single document and accessing various versions, how many times do they find themselves asking, "What has changed?", "Is this the latest version?" or "What do I need to respond to?"

Be sure to view the video tutorial: http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/ii/jigsaw/Jigsaw-tutorial.movhttp://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/ii/jigsaw/Jigsaw-tutorial.mov http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/ii/jigsaw/views.html Jigsaw: Visual Analytics for Exploring and Understanding Document Collections System Views Jigsaw presents the individual reports in a document collection and the entities within those reports through a series of visualizations. We call these visualizations the system views. Below, we illustrate each view provided by the system and briefly describe their characteristics. Click on the individual images to see a larger version of the view. Also, a tutorial video illustrates the different views as well and the interactive behavior for each view can be seen on the video tutorial page. -tj

Also see "The Information Interfaces Group, an HCI research group in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, develops computing technologies that help people take advantage of information to enrich their lives. " http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/ii/

FusionTablesLayer Builder This wizard helps you create the HTML for a map with a FusionTablesLayer and search element (either text-based search or select menu). After creating your map, you can copy and paste the HTML code in the textarea below to display the map on your own website! Please submit bug reports here: Issue Tracker

Click on the "Add another feature" drop-down to add additional layer or search box

Welcome to Graphviz Available translations:Belorussian What is Graphviz? Graphviz is open source graph visualization software. Graph visualization is a way of representing structural information as diagrams of abstract graphs and networks. It has important applications in networking, bioinformatics, software engineering, database and web design, machine learning, and in visual interfaces for other technical domains. Features The Graphviz layout programs take descriptions of graphs in a simple text language, and make diagrams in useful formats, such as images and SVG for web pages, PDF or Postscript for inclusion in other documents; or display in an interactive graph browser. (Graphviz also supports GXL, an XML dialect.) Graphviz has many useful features for concrete diagrams, such as options for colors, fonts, tabular node layouts, line styles, hyperlinks, rolland custom shapes.

Creating a newsroom tool in 30 hours or less June 28, 2012 at 2:51 PM At NewsHack in San Francisco, a team of eight journalists and developers spent 30 hours cobbling together Haystax, a point-and-click Web scraper to help anyone collect public information from online databases. Now we need help taking it to the next level.

AfDB Launches the Open Data for Africa Platform The African Development Bank Group (AfDB), in partnership with Knoema, has launched an Open Data for Africa platform aimed at significantly increasing access to quality data necessary for managing and monitoring development results in African countries, including the MDGs. The platform will also serve as a knowledge center for collecting, accessing… View all Introduction

Interactive charts add heft to your data stories Posted Feb. 16 - 10 a.m. in MJ Bear Fellows, Resources by Lucas Timmons Filed under data Data journalism can be very compelling. Stitched with a good narrative, it can tell one amazing story. But we can do better than that. We can also visualize the data and provide a great package. With that in mind, here are three free options for creating animated and interactive charts.

Who uses Cohuman? Teams Leads Members Teams Cohuman is ideal for any group of people that needs to communicate more dynamically and effectively than email or traditional collaboration tools will allow. Startups, Distributed Teams, Small Businesses, Deal Teams, Departments in larger organizations... in short Cohuman is for any group that requires a solution designed to coordinate people and manage projects more intelligently. Clear Task Ownership Assigning and tracking tasks is unambigious. Each team member has their personal responsibilities defined. Transparent Communication Everyone on the team knows exactly who is doing what - without extra effort. Intelligent Prioritization Every Task is ranked by Cohuman from the team's inputs in order of priority for people and projects so the important Tasks get done first. Dynamic Updates If a Task priority changes, the information is shared automatically with each team member - no Status update meetings or emails required. Powerful Email Integration Cohuman works for everyone on your team. Even those without a Cohuman account can interact with Cohuman via their email.

IRE Hands-On Training Materials To use these files, you need Tableau Public Desktop. It's free-- just click the orange "Download" button in the top right part of the page. Unfortunately, it's Windows only at this time, so you'll need Parallels or Bootcamp (or a friendly colleague with a PC) to run it on a Mac.

"COS-597G: Surveillance and Countermeasures (Fall 2013) Course description. This course surveys research on surveillance technologies and technical countermeasures. Readings come mostly from the computer science research literature, with some legal and policy readings to establish context. Course work will include reading and discussion, a few short writing assignments, and a substantial student-chosen course project. The course is designed for students with a solid grounding in computer science. Students unsure of their suitability of the course should contact the instructor. "

Daniel Lathrop Wanted to share with all of you my latest installment in my ongoing love affair with Google Fusion Tables, the Dallas publicly-traded companies list. http://newsapps.dallasnews.com/media/dfw-public-companies.html I got the data from the biz desk on Thursday and wrote this little thing using JQuery, JQueryUI and FusionTables pretty quickly. And before everyone gets all "but you could have used [Caspio, TableSetter, Rails, PHP, Ilene, etc.]" on me, I know I could have. But doing this with Fusion Tables let me do all my work on the client side and let me create the user-experience I wanted. Plus, I now have a starting place to do this for any similar Fusion Tables project. For the curious, the Javascript can be found here: http://newsapps.dallasnews.com/media/fusiondmn.pubcompanies.js It's fewer than 150 lines, and more than a quarter of that is my Javascript for for rendering integer/floating point #s in newsroom style (e.g. $4.2 billion). I'm hoping to turn it into a robust tool for deploying searchable data with Fusion Tables and am going to ask my corporate overlords to let me open source it once I've done some refactoring to make it generally applicable. Critiques welcome. -Daniel --------------------------- Daniel Lathrop 206.718.0349 (cell)

Data Visualization Platform, Weave, Now Open Source Logo Open Source Initiative Image via Wikipedia Civic Commons, Contributors (Karl Fogel, Author) With more and more civic data becoming available and accessible, the challenge grows for policy makers and citizens to leverage that data for better decision-making. It is often difficult to understand context and perform analysis. "Weave", however, helps. A web-based data visualization tool, Weave enables users to explore, analyze, visualize and disseminate data online from any location at any time. We saw tremendous potential in the platform and have been helping open-source the software, advising on community engagement strategy and licensing. This week, we were excited to see the soft launch of the Weave 1.0 Beta, which went open-source on Wednesday, June 15. Weave is the result of a broad partnership: it was developed by the Institute for Visualization and Perception Research at the University of Massachussetts Lowell, with support from the Open Indicators Consortium, which is made up of over ten municipal, regional, and state member organizations. This consortium will probably expand now that Weave is open source, leading hopefully to greater collaboration, more development, and further innovation on this important platform. Early-adopter data geeks should give it a spin. One of Weave's key features is high-speed interactivity and responsiveness, which is somewhat unusual in web-based visualization software; try out the demo sites or watch the video below. Our congratulations and thanks to the Weave team! As city management is increasingly data-driven, so data analysis and visualization tools will continue to be an important part of every city manager's toolkit. We are excited to see this evolving toolkit enter the civic commons. http://govinthelab.com/data-visualization-platform-weave-now-open-source

Google Refine is a power tool for working with messy data, primarily for * detecting and fixing inconsistencies * transforming data from one structure or format to another * connecting names within your data to name registries (databases) Use Google Refine when you need something ... * more powerful than a spreadsheet * more interactive and visual than scripting * more provisional / exploratory / experimental / playful than a database

Charts and graphs are the best ways to represent information and relationship between two interlinked entities. Not only do charts and graphs inform visitors about the trend or relationship you want to show them but also add a visual connection with the visitors. Several online tools are available that help you create comprehensively designed flowcharts and graphs that worth a thousands words. Check them out and let us know what you feel about these tools. http://www.smashingapps.com/2011/08/26/45-free-online-tools-to-create-charts-diagrams-and-flowcharts.html

An Applied Demography Toolbox A collection of applied demography programs, scripts, spreadsheets and databases. If you have any questions (such as how to apply the tools to your own work), recommendations or additions, you can send a message to me (Eddie Hunsinger) at edynivn@gmail.com. If you would like to use, share or reproduce any information or ideas from the linked files, be sure to cite the respective source. Here is a neat article that gives this site some inspiration. Acknowledgments. Subscribe to new postings . Return to Eddie's homepage. http://www.demog.berkeley.edu/~eddieh/toolbox.html#MedianCalculator

These tend to be US-centric, but there are universal tools here for statistical analysis.