This lesson is being piloted (Beta version)

Data Organization in Spreadsheets for Social Scientists: Instructor Notes

Instructor notes

Lesson motivation and learning objectives

The purpose of this lesson is not to teach how to do data analysis in spreadsheets, but to teach good data organization and how to do some data cleaning and quality control in a spreadsheet program.

Lesson design

Introduction

Formatting data

Common formatting problems

Dates as data

Quality assurance

The challenge with this lesson is that the instructor’s version of the spreadsheet software is going to look different than about half the room’s. It makes it challenging to show where you can find menu options and navigate through.

Instead discuss the concepts of quality control, and how things like sorting can help you find outliers in your data.

Exporting data

Concluding points

Technical tips and tricks

Provide information on setting up your environment for learners to view your live coding (increasing text size, changing text color, etc), as well as general recommendations for working with coding tools to best suit the learning environment.

Common problems

Excel looks and acts different on different operating systems

The main challenge with this lesson is that Excel looks very different and how you do things is even different between Mac and PC, and between different versions of Excel. So, the presenter’s environment will only be the same as some of the learners.

We need better notes and screenshots of how things work on both Mac and PC. But we likely won’t be able to cover all the different versions of Excel.

If you have a helper who has experience with the other OS than you, it would be good to prep them to help with this lesson and tell how people to do things in the other OS.

Apple Numbers

Apple Numbers does not have data validation, which is needed for part of this lesson. A note is included in the setup instructions pointing Numbers users to either Microsoft Excel or LibreOffice.

People are not interactive or responsive on the Exercise

This lesson depends on people working on the exercise and responding with things that are fixed. If your audience is reluctant to participate, start out with some things on your own, or ask a helper for their answers. This generally gets even a reluctant audience started.