Census-CSV-Excel

It has been a very busy few weeks for ChattaData, though you wouldn't know it from reading the blog. I bought a laptop to dedicate to my datasets and programs and am still fine tuning it. I got Tableau to use for exploration, analysis and presentation so more graphics and interactive elements will be coming from there. (There might be some workarounds for Safari users who can't view tableau workbooks, more on that later.) Installed Microsoft's Pivot program, spent a few minutes with it so far...not sure how useful it is yet.

If you haven't looked at our Census progress yet, they are posting new files daily at the Take 10 Map site. As of this moment the Mail Participation Rate for Tennessee is 54%, Hamilton County 54%, and Chattanooga 51%. I have been downloading the daily files on these, and recently they added the filter where you can download by state. I took the CSV label literally and tried to open it directly into Tableau as a comma separated value file. It wasn't happy since it is actually a pipe delimited file. A trivial thing to fix, but a good reminder of the fact that I haven't come across much data that was ready to go. In that respect, Excel is one of my new best friends. I have used it for years for pretty basic things, but as I have been populating some mysql databases lately it has been a workhorse. I use some other spreadsheet programs as well, but have several actions in Excel that make it indispensable.

So there. I have purchased a pc laptop and sung praise to Excel, all in one week, all in one post.