The Periodic Table: when do I use spreadsheets

I don’t. Next question? I am only partially joking. The most common format for the output of most non-proprietary large datasets (at least in healthcare) seems to be CSV. Occasionally I can grab a SAS file but I think spreadsheets are here to stay. A CSV file has all of the formatting and formulas stripped out of the file so although they are still cumbersome--they work.

This data is from the Household Pulse 2020 COVID household survey from the Census. You can readily see that the ability to gather any information about the shape of this data is limited.

Writing a few lines of Python code can provide information about the shape of data and the variables included although unless you are familiar with the data, you will also need to download the data dictionary. This particular survey contains 82 columns and 132,961 entries or rows.

Generating an html provided the visualization below where we can quickly review the data with less than 5 minutes of code writing--including downloading the necessary packages. If we were performing an actual analysis there are also important cleaning steps where we can import the CSV into Tableau Prep first and write a script to help with assigning variable names and shaping the data for easier analyses but my objective is simply to introduce you to some of the other options to access early in your data exploration to provide immediate insights.

You can also explore data on CENSUS website and use their interactive tool. I usually start here and formulate data questions as I go. Reach out with any questions. The newly launched newsletter will be designed to included links for deeper dive tutorials or a focused narrative for less tech orientated subscribers. You can subscribe here. Because I am switching my existing list of subscribers to the old format over to the new format--anyone subscribing to the new format before the end of September will continue to have access for free.