Duplicate the data sheet(s) & never touch it againĢ. You can use this index to jump to individual parts of the article:ģ. Just decide individually which methods makes sense to consider. For example, if you don’t have dates, the part “Correct dates” won’t be relevant. You won’t need to go through all of the following steps every single time. (Ok, let’s be honest: In most cases, you will need to do something.)
But sometimes you’ll just plug the data in Datawrapper without changing anything. How much work you need to put in to clean up the data depends on the data. Yes, sometimes you’ll sit for days to clean up a single data set. “Without analyzing it, without visualizing it!”īut don’t sweat. “All to simply clean up the data!” you might think.
We need to make our data readable for software like Excel or Datawrapper before we can bother making it readable for humans. Note that tidying up your data as described here is not the same as making your numbers as readable or as beautiful-looking as possible. This article tries to explain the methods and Excel formulas you’ll need most often to get your data ready to analyze or plug into Datawrapper. If that’s the case, you likely need to clean up the data first in spreadsheet software like Excel or Google Sheets. And you uploaded it to our charting & mapping tool Datawrapper to create a chart like this one:īut Datawrapper showed you some errors or didn’t even display the data as you wanted.