Electronic spreadsheets have been around for nearly 40 years now. They were invented by Bob Frankston and Dan Bricklin, founders of VisiCalc, and I had a chance to chat with both gentlemen a couple of months ago. I highly recommend watching this TED talk with Dan Bricklin:

It's important to understand for…

My writing engagement at Data Science Central came up unexpectedly. Back in August 2018, I stumbled upon an excellent write-up on Data Science Central. The author, Bill Vorhies, shared his thoughts on career transitioning toward data science. I wrote him an email, complimenting him on his blog post, and I dropped a few lines about my own transition. Here's his response:

"Congratulations on your remarkable journey. Perhaps you’d like to write one or more articles…

Over the last years, my small business has undergone a digital transformation from a marketing service company to a data literacy consultancy. What does a data literacy consultancy do? We teach business users within large enterprises to work with data, and we help them acquire the necessary skills from state of the art Excel to Python, querying structured, semi-structured and unstructured databases, as well as math, statistics, and probability.

Throughout our…

The short answer is: "No."

Source: LEGO

I started teaching myself programming in my 40s, and I am a strong advocate that everyone should learn to code. Even if you have no intent to become a developer or a full-stack data scientist, coding teaches you a couple valuable lessons:

• It disciplines you to…

English is becoming the official language in the global business world, being currently spoken by approximately 1.75 billion people worldwide according to Harvard Business Review. While English is the fastest spreading language in human history, a significant proportion of businesses are still resistant to giving up…

Latest update: November 16, 2018

Microsoft Excel has been around for over 30 years now, and chances are it's not going to change in the foreseeable future. In fact, Excel is facing immense competition from challengers such as Google Spreadsheets and well-funded start-ups like Airtable, which are both going after Excel's massive user base of approximately 500 million worldwide. Tech-savvy small and mid-sized businesses embrace innovative alternatives to Excel. However,…

At the time of writing this post, I am nine months into my learning sabbatical. You can read about my journey here: “Career Transition Towards Data Analytics & Science”. Today I will share with you how you can plan your own, unique learning sabbatical, regardless of its scope and duration –…

(This post originally appeared here) 

In a…

Let’s face it – cleaning data is a waste of time.

If only the data had been collected and entered carefully in the first place, you wouldn’t be faced with days of data cleaning to do. Worse still, your boss probably doesn’t understand why you can’t just do it in a few minutes. After all, you only need to click a few buttons in Excel, don’t you?

Yeah, right…

Well, we all hate data cleaning, but if we get organised and learn a few tricks there are ways to…

Did you have a good, relaxing break over the summer? Are you refreshed and re-energised, looking forward to a new start, a new you and brushing up on your data analysis skills? If so, I’ve thrown together a collection of a few excellent (and free!) statistics eBooks for your Kindle to sharpen up your stats while you’re on the long commute to work. Just try not to read them while driving!

These books require different levels of existing knowledge, and while some are for…

It’s been a rather quiet summer on Data Science Central with fewer blog posts being published than at other times of the year, but I guess it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise – DSC has had to compete against summer holidays, the Euro 2016 football tournament and the Rio 2016 Olympics.

Of the relatively few that have been published, there have been a few gems. At the time of writing, the 5 blog posts on this list have been read by almost 60,000 of you.

If you haven’t seen any…

Going somewhere nice for your summer holidays? Somewhere with a nice beach perhaps – Goa, Grand Cayman or Grimsby? Or a bustling city break? Wherever you’re going there’s sure to be long periods where you’ll sit for hours on end with little to do but read, so I thought I’d throw together a few free eBooks for your Kindle to while away the long hours in the airport, in a traffic jam or on the beach.

A mixture of books about data, analysis, statistics and R programming, they’re all very…

Pretty much every data rookie starts with Excel. It is a wonderful program for storing, cleaning and analysing (yes, you read that correctly) your data.

Strictly speaking, Excel isn’t free, but really – who pays for it these days? If you buy a Windows PC or laptop it’ll usually come pre-installed, and if you get a new PC at work your employer will have it pre-installed for you. If you’re prepared to look the other way, there are guys who know guys who can get you a copy that fell off…

I know this is an old joke in the BI community but I couldn't resist.  I was recently forwarded an article on the continued popularity of Excel in the BI community consisting of quotes from 27 experts saying how great and how relevant Excel remains.

We do categorize BI as static and historical as opposed to forward looking predictive analytics but I bet it's still true that Excel is a very widely used tool even by folks that…