Breaking Bad Data Habits

It’s a common mistake to get creative with your data in excel to such an extent that its next to impossible to use that data effectively.

The concept of keep it simple stupid is hard to follow as once a person has some data they tend to spend far more time formatting and decorating it then they do analyzing it. Its just human nature.

However when we don’t keep data in clean and easy to access formats, we pretty much make that data useless to anyone else who really wants to play with it.

The best and really only way to keep data useful is to have it in a simple column with 1 header row format. From that we can use numerous tools to both format and analyze the data like pivot tables and Tableau.