Tidy data in Excel

excel

beginner

Excel for beginners

Published

April 25, 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:

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

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

As a self taught user of Excel it’s always good to find out about different ways of doing things, this was a good back to basics and reminder of best practice.
found the session interesting, there is always something that you can learn from these sessions
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.

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