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Data Organization in Spreadsheets

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  • Karl W. Broman
  • Kara H. Woo

Abstract

Spreadsheets are widely used software tools for data entry, storage, analysis, and visualization. Focusing on the data entry and storage aspects, this article offers practical recommendations for organizing spreadsheet data to reduce errors and ease later analyses. The basic principles are: be consistent, write dates like YYYY-MM-DD, do not leave any cells empty, put just one thing in a cell, organize the data as a single rectangle (with subjects as rows and variables as columns, and with a single header row), create a data dictionary, do not include calculations in the raw data files, do not use font color or highlighting as data, choose good names for things, make backups, use data validation to avoid data entry errors, and save the data in plain text files.

Suggested Citation

  • Karl W. Broman & Kara H. Woo, 2018. "Data Organization in Spreadsheets," The American Statistician, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 72(1), pages 2-10, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:amstat:v:72:y:2018:i:1:p:2-10
    DOI: 10.1080/00031305.2017.1375989
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    Cited by:

    1. B. Preedip Balaji & M. Dhanamjaya, 2019. "Preprints in Scholarly Communication: Re-Imagining Metrics and Infrastructures," Publications, MDPI, vol. 7(1), pages 1-23, January.
    2. Diego Kozlowski & Jennifer Dusdal & Jun Pang & Andreas Zilian, 2021. "Semantic and relational spaces in science of science: deep learning models for article vectorisation," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(7), pages 5881-5910, July.

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