Raw Data

Data & Excel

Adam Varoqua Uncategorized , , , , , 0 Comment

Data is fun! Excel is a friend with wonderful shortcuts! Those words have been rarely if ever uttered in the English language but it’s actually true in a way. As the merits and cons of using Excel has been reported before in the blog, I figured it is good to carry on that tradition. Working with self-reported data in this study is an experience that I can ever forget and I believe I can say the same for my fellow student researchers’. The data that we worked with provides insight into how people come into contact with various languages through their life experiences. It’s intimate in its own way as you really get to see and understand people’s lives and shared stories.

But then comes the transcribing and coding part of research which is an interesting ride on its own. You see, Excel, our primary mode of transferring the data on flashcards, is a very handy tool but we had to make sure that ALL the data was copied over. Read more

Microsoft Excel vs. Google Sheets: Which One Did We Choose?

Anastasia Bushey Coding, Data, Google Drive, Microsoft Excel, Organization, Project , , , , 0 Comment

Initially, we were going to use Google’s spreadsheet because we could all edit it in one place, but we encountered a few problems. Some of the data in the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet when opened in the Google spreadsheet would overlap into other columns, making it hard to read. Additionally, there would be the occasion where data that was present in the Excel sheet was missing in Google’s spreadsheet. As another point, we all had the same version (2013) of Microsoft Excel  pre-downloaded on our laptops which made Microsoft Excel compatibility easy. It was unanimously decided that we use Microsoft Excel to input data. However, we also decided to use Google Drive to save and share our data on a cloud. Google Drive also updated us via email anytime one of us contributed to our shared folder.

We created three folders in google docs to organize our saved spreadsheets and other files. These three were ‘1st DH Raw Data’, ‘2nd DH Raw Data’, and ‘DH Meeting Docs’. The third folder held our meeting minutes, or what our discussions were when we met and what goals we discussed to have done before we next met. Both the first and second raw data folders had sub folders of ‘checked’ and ‘unchecked’, where the previously naming convention came in handy. Additionally, both raw data set folders had their respective index card scanned copies were saved there. In doing this, we kept all files organized well and were able to share files efficiently. Although we all saved the most recent files to our desktops and to a shared USB drive for backup, Google Drive assured that our updated and previous files were in one place that we could all access from any computer.