During Jeff’s workshop, we played with a lot of data sets and were armed with Excel skills. For me, after constructing the Excel tutorial and did a review of Excel, the knowledge would be as solid as possible.

       1st data set is from world bank: life expectancy at birth.

         Just remember that every time you play with a data set, just make a copy it, and keep the original in case that you mess up with the data.

1. Make a copy of your data within the same file, just a new worksheet and rename it;
2. Clean the data for your specific use:

•  Hide unnecessary columns, in case that they would be useful later;                                    (Unhide by selecting the columns surrounding them)
•  Format number (Click on the left top corner so that you could select all);
•  Freeze panes to lock the column header;
•  Format auto column width;
•  Use shift key to select a row or column range;
•  Use filter to filter the blanks;
•  Filter is stupid to do multiple choices;

The story: China has the most increasing number of life expectancy from year 1996 to 2014 among 10 biggest countries.

Here is the modified data set.

2nd data set is from U.S. Census: Imports in the U.S.

 3rd date set is from U.S. Patent and Trademark Office