Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets are powerful and widely used. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to use them, data scientists say.
Christie Bahlai, a computational ecologist at Kent State University in Ohio, has helped to create workshops and teaches courses on best spreadsheet practices for ecologists. She says her number-one piece of advice is to “keep your raw data raw”.Spreadsheets, Bahlai says, are “tactile”: they are user-friendly, intuitive and easily manipulated. But they are also “easy to mess up”, and it is “easy to lose track of what you’ve done”. An errant mouse click can cause data to end up in the wrong place.
“My top piece [of advice] is, do not encode data with colour or formatting, create another column that can be sorted or filtered,” says Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel, a statistician at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Luis Verde Arregoitia, a mammalogist at the Institute of Ecology in Veracruz, Mexico, experienced that when he revisited an old collection of biodiversity records. He had highlighted rows in yellow, orange or green to indicate his level of trust in the data. “At this point,” he says, “I don’t really remember the exact colour-coding scheme that I was using.”Data-analysis tools expect spreadsheets to be in a specific format: one row of column titles, no merged cells and one table per page.
Designate a spreadsheet as a ‘code book’ that documents abbreviations, how data were collected, units of measurement, how missing values will be represented, the calculations being performed and any metadata needed to understand, process and maintain the spreadsheet. “Writing a roadmap for yourself is important,” says Çetinkaya-Rundel.
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