With an undergraduate degree in zoology and a master's in public health, you wouldn't expect Amanda Makulec to lead a successful career in data analytics and data visualization. As we've seen with multiple guests on the podcast, the path to a career in data analytics is windy and unexpected. It was the intersection of public health and data visualization that got Amanda interested in data visualization as a career. In one of her roles, Amanda was supporting USAID by analyzing open data sets...

Sometimes pop culture and data analysis meet and the result is something interesting, thought-provoking, and of course controversial. How can one use data to prove definitely which Taylor Swift songs are the most underrated? Isn't this a question for your heart to answer? Andrew Firriolo sought to answer this question over the last few months and the results are interesting (if you're a Taylor Swift fan). As a Swiftie since 2006 (moniker for Taylor Swift fans), Andrew wanted to find a way to...

We sometimes forget that a large organization is composed of groups and divisions. Within these groups, there are teams and individuals looking to advance their careers. Sometimes at the expense of others. When your advancement depends on the success of your project, the benefits of that project to your company may be suspect and the tools you use to complete that project may not be the best tools for the job. Alex Kolokolov started his journey in data like many of us: in Excel. He moved on...

When you think of data journalism, you might think of The New York Times' nifty data visualizations and the Times' embrace of data literacy for all their journalists. Outside of The New York Times, I haven't met anyone who does data journalism and data storytelling full-time until I spoke with Ben Wylie. Ben is the lead financial journalist at a financial publication in London. Like many data analysts, he cut his teeth in Excel, got his equivalent of a CPA in the UK, and received his master's...

There are only so many ways to make Excel "fun." If you've been following this blog/podcast, stories about the financial modeling competition and spreadsheet errors that lead to catastrophic financial loss are stories that make a 1980s tool somewhat interesting to read and listen to. There are numerous tutorials and TikTok influencers who teach Excel for those who are actually in the tool day in and day out. Meet Matt Basta, a software engineer by trade. He published a story on his own blog...

One of the more popular courses you could take at my college to fulfill the finance major requirements was Behavioral Finance. The main "textbook" was Inefficient Markets and we learned about how there are qualitative ways to value a security beyond what the efficient market hypothesis purports. During the financial crisis of 2008, psychology professor and behavioral economist Dan Ariely published Predictably Irrational to much fanfare. The gist of the book is that humans are less rational...

Data analytics and business analytics are still relatively new areas of study (in terms of academics). The subject borders business and computer science. When I went to school, the only data analytics classes available were special electives offered through our school's continuing education department. In this episode, I spoke with Zach Wilner who currently leads data and analytics at Pair Eyewear. Zach is a "classically trained" in data analytics (if one can call it such) since he studied...

Future Dear Analyst episodes will get more sporadic since, well, life gets in the way. Unfortunately curiosity (in most cases) doesn't pay the bills. Nevertheless, when I come across an idea or person that I think is worth sharing/learning more about, I'll try my best to post. In this episode, I interview the Chief Scientist of a data startup who did his PhD at Stern NYU and was on track go becoming a professor. Then he got an internship at Facebook and everything changed. The speed of...

No, this isn't an episode about how Facebook's algorithm and feed works. The data science function is popping up in companies small and large given the amount of data swimming around. No other company understand the power and influence that data science can have on the customer experience than Facebook (Meta, to be exact). Akos Lada is Facebook's Director of Data Science for Feed Ranking and Recommendations. Akos has always been interested in the intersection of social science and data, so...

The Google Workspace team announced a slew of Google Sheets functions a few months ago (February 2023). These functions look familiar and that's because Microsoft Excel released most of them two years ago. I never had a chance to play around with the new functions in Excel since I don't have the latest Office 365 version. Now that they are live in Google Sheets, I played around with them and find them pretty interesting for data manipulation purposes. I think what's interesting about these...

This news is a bit old but I figured it's juicy enough to talk about its future implications on Excel and artificial intelligence in general. Mid-March 2023, Microsoft announced Copilot, it's artificial intelligence bet that will supposedly change the way we work. The video discusses how Copilot integrates with Office 365 and all your Microsoft apps including Excel. Around minute 18:00, they show a demo of how Copilot helps you find trends, make adjustments to your models, and more. It's...

Counting the number of colored cells or formatted cells in Google Sheets or Excel seems like it should be a basic operation. Unfortunately after much Googling, it doesn't seem as easy as it looks. I came across this Mr. Excel forum thread where someone asks how to count the number of rows where there is a colored cell. The answers range from VBA to writing formulas that indicate whether a cell should be colored to the usual online snark. I think the basic issue is this. A majority of Excel or...

When you think of data pipelines, data warehouses, and ETL tools, you may be thinking about some large enterprise that is collecting and processing data from IoT devices or from a mobile app. These companies are using tools from AWS and Google Cloud to build these complex workflows to get data to where it needs to be. In this episode, you'll hear about a relatively small company who is using modern cloud and data tools rivaling these aforementioned enterprises. Elite Development Group is a...

It's that time of the year again where data professionals look at their data predictions from 2022 and decide what they were wrong about and think: "this must be the year for XYZ." Aside from the fact that these type of predictions are 100% subjective and nearly impossible to verify, it's always fun to play armchair quarterback and make a forecast about the future (see why forecasts are flawed in this episode about Superforecasting). The reason why predicting what will happen in 2023 is that...

This is a re-broadcast of an episode of the Secret Ops podcast hosted by my friend Ariana Cofone. Ariana is an operations consultant and her podcast is all about business operations. While I've never officially held a "business operations" role, I've worked in roles that are related to the operations world. In this conversation, we dive into what operations is, how I approach building workflows and solutions for people, and of course, why knowing Excel and SQL are crucial to getting into the...

One topic that hasn't been covered on Dear Analyst is master data management (MDM). I'm surprised it took this long before someone brought it up. I've never heard of the term before and it looks like it's a core strategy for many large corporations for manager their data. Korhonda Randolph studied systems engineering at the University of Pennsylvania and started her career in engineering. She started specializing in master data management at companies like AutoTrader, Cox Automotive, and...

Have you ever faced a spreadsheet where one column contains values for each "section" of the spreadsheet but you want to fill those values down through the rest of the column? This is a common problem when you get a data dump from a database or perhaps a copy/paste from a PivotTable. You have values interspersed in the column and want to fill the empty cells below those values with the value above it, but not all the way down. See this screenshot below to see what I mean: This...

Johnson & Johnson is one of the largest corporations in the world and they produce everything from medical devices to baby powder. They were also on the front lines of developing a vaccine during the pandemic. Internally, J&J is also at the forefront of digital transformation. Sarfraz Nawaz studied computer science and built data analytics and decision intelligence platforms inside companies across different industries. Sarfraz currently does product and digital management for...

This episode is a re-broadcast of a podcast I did with Bassem Dghaidi, a senior software engineer at GitHub. Bassem has a podcast and YouTube channel called Glich. On his show, he covers moderate to advanced engineering topics on coding, architecture and management. Data analytics is a little outside of the topics he generally talks about, but there are many crossovers between data analytics and engineering as you have probably heard on Dear Analyst. We cover a lot of basic concepts...

Matthew Brandt didn't know analytics was a potential career option until he started managing websites with Google Analytics. Matthew is Canadian, spent most of his life in Switzerland, and went to high school in Japan. He attended the EHL hospitality school at Lausanne, and was part of the 70% who left the hospitality field after graduation to start his career in analytics. From data engineering to data architecture to reverse ETL, Matthew has done and seen it all. To merge his love for...

Gift Ojeabulu is a data science professional, community organizer, and data practitioner from Nigeria. He studied biochemistry at university but eventually switched to computer science. He first started in web and Android development before moving to the data science field. By attending developers conferences in Lagos, he started learning more about data science and started building his own data science communities in 2019. He learned a lot of his skills through Udacity and even won a data...

Once you learn the VLOOKUP formula, your world opens up in terms of being able to analyze and manipulate data. There are hundreds if not thousands of tutorials on how to use the VLOOKUP formula since it's such a powerful formula for finding the data you need in a long list. Comparable formulas include the combination of INDEX and MATCH and the new XLOOKUP formula which took the Excel world by storm. One common task you might need to do as an analyst is find data based on multiple conditions...

I'm always fascinated by how different people on the podcast find their way into data, and this episode is no exception. Austin Dowd has always enjoyed photography. He was associated with the American Marketing Association and was always curious in the metrics for his photos. After pestering the analytics person in the AMA in terms of how to analyze his photo metrics, he eventually decided to do a career change into analytics and received a Nanodegree in data analytics through Udemy. This...

I used to create a monthly 30-slide report and each slide had a different table or chart that I copied and pasted from Excel. As a naive analyst, I literally filtered my list of data using regular dropdown filters on each column to get the numbers I needed. I would filter, sum or average the data, and then enter the data onto the slide. It was super manual work. One benefit was I got really good at using keyboard shortcuts to filter a list of data. I didn't realize that a PivotTable could...