Tidy data in Excel (Excel for beginners session 2)

excel
beginner
Excel for beginners
Published

September 10, 2025

This session is part of our Excel for beginners course. That’s a series of six linked sessions, delivered on Teams, that give an introduction to Excel for people working in health and social care. The sessions are:

Together, they aim to help you develop an appropriate set of Excel skills to help your work. This session covers:

KIND Excel beginner skill tree

Previous attendees have said…

  • 22 previous attendees have left feedback
  • 95% would recommend this session to a colleague
  • 100% said that this session was pitched correctly

NoteThree random comments from previous attendees
  • I really enjoyed the session. Firstly, Brendan explanations are very clear and easy to follow. Very well pitched for the audience and goes to the point. Secondly, he comes across as an approachable and really keen colleague willing to help others / ensuring we understand what he is saying. Thirdly, I really like the fact that we can practice things at the same time as him! I will definitely come back to more sessions.
  • A great introduction into getting data setup in a clean and tidy way.
  • Having never had this mentioned to me in the past this was a fantastic session. Lots of useful information & tips.
TipForthcoming session(s)
Booking link Date
Tidy data in Excel (Excel for beginners session 2) 10:00-11:30 Thu 13th November 2025

Session outline

  • a word of warning
  • understanding tidy data
  • a practical introduction to making tidy data
  • text to columns
  • transposing

A word of warning

  • tidying data can be very slow and complicated
  • in Excel, there are lots of advanced tools that can speed things up
  • this is a beginner’s session, so we’ll avoid the more fancy tools
  • but if your process takes lots of manual work, it’s definitely worth exploring alternative ways of working

Tidy data

year 25-29yrs 30-34yrs 35-39yrs
2018 73.4 90.9 54.2
2019 71.0 88.6 52.7
2020 66.8 83.4 49.4
2021 69.6 85.9 52.8
2022 66.7 84.4 52.0
  • one value per cell
  • each column contains all the values of one measurement
  • each row shows all the values for one year

Entering values

  • imagine that we want to measure something across several years: 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022?
  • practical:
    • open Excel
    • start a new workbook
    • add a column header year in cell A1
    • then add each of those five years values in the five cells underneath (down to A6)

More values

  • we’re going to be using some birthrate data from the NRS for this session. We’ll start by adding some birth rate data
  • this is given as births per 1,000 women in five year age brackets. We’ll start with 25-29 year old mothers
  • please add the header 25-29yrs in cell B1
  • here are the values for our five years: 73.4, 71, 66.8, 69.6, 66.7

Another column

30-34yrs
90.9
88.6
83.4
85.9
84.4
  • please could you add some new data to your table showing births for another age group

Back to tidy data

  • we’ve now got some data with:
    • each value in a cell
    • each variable in a column
      • here, this is a maternal age bracket
    • each observation in a row
      • here, this is a year

Fixing several values per cell

  • We often find useful data with more than one value per cell
  • this can be helpful for humans multiple values is good for humans, but bad for Excel
  • Excel can’t do anything with this data

Exercise: many values per cell

35-39
54.2 (21%)
52.7 (20%)
49.4 (19%)
52.8 (20%)
52 (20%)
  • please add this column of data to your table
  • does it look similar to your existing data?

What’s the solution?

  • make this data have one value per cell
  • we could remove all the percentages by hand
  • Text to Columns gives us a better tool for the job Text to Columns gives us a better tool for the job

Text to Columns

  • select a column
  • in the Data tab of the ribbon, you should find the Text to Columns tool Text to Columns tool
  • note that you can keep, or remove, the percentage column. We’ll skip it, to keep things simple keep, or remove, the percentage column

Exercise: transposed data

Bracket 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022
25-29yrs 73.4 71.0 66.8 69.6 66.7
30-34yrs 90.9 88.6 83.4 85.9 84.4
35-39yrs 54.2 52.7 49.4 52.8 52.0
  • sometimes you’ll find data where the columns and rows have been flipped
  • that’s slow to fix by hand, but luckily you can transpose it, which swaps rows and columns
  • select your data, and copy/paste into a new cell
  • then use the transpose option
    transpose option