Neck deep in data

This week, like part of last week, is processing data. I am working on two projects, both spreadsheet heavy.

The first is for a paper that involved us going back and remining almost sixty websites for course offerings and program listings. I’ve derived subset data sets about three times now. Every time we do it, we discover new questions based on inconsistencies. We go back, diambiguate and try again. I hope this is the last time. I’ve gotten about one-third of the processing done. I will have time to work on it tomorrow morning as well.

Then after that, I will finish the data for my presentation to the pharmacy students on Friday. I have their resource use and the analysis from their first rotation last fall. I’ll be looking at some of their electives as well. Those will be harder to process. If all goes well, I want to get this developed into a more formal project. I’d like the data from the course of a year. There might be some interesting differences over time.

In either case, it’s been a fabulous week for learning more about Excel formulas. I have been discovering all sorts of functions that allow me to return data with minimal effort. After I get the basic formula down, I can clone from sheet to sheet. And I’m still using baby functions as it were. I’ll probably still work on something tonight. There’s too much to get done. I haven’t been relying on my task manager much so who knows what else I’m getting behind on.