excel_slides.md

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Excel	presentation	theme transition solarized fade

Quality control

Questions:

• How can we carry out basic quality control and quality assurance in spreadsheets?

Objectives:

• Apply quality control techniques to identify errors in spreadsheets and limit incorrect data entry.

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Quality Assurance

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Quality Control

• Don't forget to keep the original data pristine and create a readme.txt file
• Helpful resource: Cornell University's guidance on creating readme.txt files

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Sorting

• Invalid values often sort to the bottom or top of a column
• Sort the data on each column one at a time to root out poor data

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Conditional Formatting

• Use with caution
• Can be a good strategy for flagging outliers

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Exporting data

Questions:

• How can we export data from spreadsheets in a way that is useful for downstream applications?

Objectives:

• Store spreadsheet data in universal file formats.
• Export data from a spreadsheet to a .csv file.

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Storing data using native formats is problematic

• We do not recommend using .xls, .xlsx (Excel), or .ods (LibreOffice) file formats
• More and more journals and grant agencies are requiring researchers to deposit data in a data repository (most of them do not accept Excel formats)
• Storing data in universal, open, and static formats keeps data consistent and reduces the possibility of error

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Suggested formats

• Tab-delimited (.tsv) files
• Comma-delimited (.csv) files

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Advantages of open formats

• Most software recognizes these formats
• The encoding is simple, so they will continue to be interpretable into the future
• These formats work well with version-control software like Git