MS Excel on Steroids!

I admit: I use MS Excel a lot and I'm still amazed how much more there is 'under the hood' in terms of functions, analysis options, and charting tricks - here are a few good ones I came across recently:

• An Empty Bar (by Ann K. Emery)
• Removing the Double Y Axis (by Ann K. Emery)
• VLookup (by Ann K. Emery)
• From Data to Charts in 5 minutes (by Ann K. Emery)
• Excel Elbow Grease (great tricks by Ann K. Emery)
• Muted Grid Lines and Area Charts (by Ann K. Emery)
• Number Formatting / Conditional Formatting (by Ann K. Emery)
• Formatting Months, Days, and Years in Excel (by Ann K. Emery)
• Label Axis and/or Data? (by Ann K. Emery)
• Formatting Names (by Ann K. Emery)
• Sorting and Filtering your Spreadsheets (by Ann K. Emery)
• Place Labels Directly On Line Graph (by Anne K. Emery)
• Custom Color Codes in Excel (by Anne K. Emery)
• Categorize values with =IF() and =VLOOKUP() (by Anne K. Emery)
• Sparklines and Data Bars (by Anne K. Emery)
• Easy Dot Plots in MS Excel (by Stephanie Evergreen)
• Dumbbell Dot Plots in MS Excel I (by Stephanie Evergreen)
• Dumbbell Dot Plots in MS Excel II (by Stephanie Evergreen)
• Make a Slopegraph in Excel (by Stephanie Evergreen)
• Adding a Benchmark Line (by Stephanie Evergreen)
• Customizing Colors (by Stephanie Evergreen)
• Showing Standard Deviation (by Stephanie Evergreen)
• Confidence Intervals to Dot Plots (by Stephanie Evergreen)
• Directly Labeling Excel Charts (by Jonathan Schwabish)
• Swimmer Plots (Jon Peltier)
• Pivot Tables (Jon Peltier)
• Interactive data dashboards (Ben Collins)
• Supercategory axis labels (Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic)
• Plotting value within range (Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic)
• Embedding a vertical reference line in Excel (Elizabeth Ricks)

Citizen Science

It's been a while since I read anything about that and so the paper Engagement in science through citizen science: Moving beyond data collection (Phillips et al. 2018) was interesting: yes, tell me how we can move beyond just running around outside to collect data. That's fun and important, but that's not science.

Well, turns out that we may want the CS participants to get involved more in the data analysis and project design, but they don't. They are happy collecting data and leaving the rest to the scientists.

Well, that makes sense - we simply cannot engage with everything. There are some things that we just want to do and support but not think about too deeply.

Firefox Send

Firefox Send is a simple and easy way to share files that are too large for Email attachments. I really would like to use Firefox...but Google Drive/Docs works so much better in Google and my Outlook for Web works so much better in IE.

Need a better bar chart?

Take a look at ways to make a better bar chart @ the Bar Chart Menu.

FastCharts

Add your data and chart it using FastCharts. That's it. Quick and easy and not many options for customization. Download as PNG or SVG.

The Problem With Concrete

Landslide / Earthflow