Workshop location: Glucksman Library, The Edge (GL1-025)

Good data organization is the foundation of any research project. Spreadsheet programs like Excel can be used to structure data but give a lot of freedom to do it inefficiently.

This workshop will teach “tidy” data practices, structuring data in a machine-readable way to maximize the utility of the data. The aim is to create data sets that are interoperable with each other and could be used in a multitude of software applications or in programming languages like R or Python.

This in-person training covers:

• good data entry practices and formatting of data tables,
• how to avoid common formatting mistakes,
• approaches for handling dates as data,
• basic quality control and data manipulation in spreadsheets and
• exporting data from spreadsheets.

This workshop is not about data analysis or visualization with spreadsheets.

Demonstrations and explanations will be alternating with small hands-on exercises done by the participants with an example data set. The training room has computers available, but participants can bring their own devices and work on them. The only software requirement is a spreadsheet program like Excel. Workshop material and exercises will be available on the workshop website.

This workshop will be useful for any researcher working with data in spreadsheets and is based on Data Carpentry lessons.

The workshop can be attended as part of the Researcher Development Programme, earning 1 credit towards the Researcher Development Digital Badge.