Delanie Majors
All the articles, provided clever and useful tips, tricks, and information for those who are just starting to learn excel. One of the things I found most interesting came from the AP article on how to avoid ten common mistakes. One of their tips was to index before you sort. This means to create a new column that just has numbers all the way down from one to whatever the last row is. This will allow you to go back to the original way the data was sorted if you ever wish to. I know we have been taught to create a copy of every file we come into contact with, but this is just one extra safety measure, and you can never be too safe.
Another thing that I found to be very important was the fact that data dictionaries exist. They talk about them pretty extensively in the AP Stylebook entry, as well as in the AP article about the ten most common mistakes. There was also a link to an article titled, “How to Read a Data Dictionary”. I had never heard of data dictionaries until I read these articles. I looked them up beyond the articles you provided because I was still unsure about what they were without an example. From the reading I did and from the articles that were provided, these seem like really helpful tools that you should read before starting. All journalists should make sure they fully understand the information they are working with in order to report the facts. You wouldn’t want to report something that wasn’t true just because you didn’t fully understand what you were reporting. Plus the better you understand it, the better you can explain it to your readers or viewers.
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