Tidy data in Excel

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

Three random comments from previous attendees

• So many useful tips and tricks - loving these sessions 🤩
• Excellent interactive training - very helpful and practical
• Excellent tips to ensure the foundation data structure is correct to ensure you don’t trip up down the line and waste time manually tydying data in order to extract anything meaningful.

Welcome

• this session is for 🌶 Excel beginners
• this is a mainly-practical session, and you’ll need Excel of some sort to follow along

Where does this fit in?

KIND Excel beginner skill tree

• for this session, you’ll need to be familiar with the Excel basics (getting around in Excel, opening/saving/closing files, and a little bit of A1 referencing)
• we’re going to dodge formatting and formulas as much as possible today

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

date	service_a	service_b
2025-01-01	99	11
2025-01-02	77	33
2025-01-03	55	55

• one value per cell
• each column contains all the values of one measurement
• each row shows all the values for one date

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 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
  
• 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

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

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