Category: analytics
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How much gasoline do we American consumers buy each week? An Example of Excel Modeling
I am a fan of Bill Gates. But the reason I bring his name up in here is because he just demonstrated the power of logical thinking, something very important in Excel modeling. First of all, let’s watch this short video: In the video, Bill first asked an intriguing question: How much gasoline do we…
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How to Draw a 3-D Chart
If you have 3-dimensional data, drawing a 3D chart can be very helpful in visualizing how the two variable jointly affect the outcome. In Microsoft Excel, such 3D charts are called “Surface Plots”. Here is a quick tutorial. Please note that your data will need to be in a table (Download Excel file here)in order…
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Chance of Nothing Happening? The Power of Joint Probabilities
Yesterday, as I was reading a book about Blackstone, the famed asset management company, something caught my attention. It was about how one of its executives describing evaluating risks in a potential deal: ” You say there’s a chance there’s a major terrorism event blowing up an airline, but that happens once in twenty years,…
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This Site Has Abundant Climate Data
I have always been fascinated by climate data. Just today while researching for data on this topic, I came upon the Berkley Earth website and found that it has warehoused detailed climate data for the last 350 years! It has done quite some interesting analysis. For example, they have taken a long view on earth temperature…
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Here is Another Example on Why Excel will Never Go Away – Julia Computing
Recently I had a conversation with a colleague who argues that Excel will die because he felt people are switching to other computing environments such as R. While I agree there are more people who are using other computing languages such as R, I do not agree Excel will be out of fashion very soon. …
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Tesla Needs to Be More Rigorous in Discussing Numbers
Not to pick on Tesla – Many companies do this – But it really needs to be more rigorous in discussing its numbers. Take the most recent press release on its car safety as an example. In its Q3 2018 Vehicle Safety Report, it wrote the following: “ Over the past quarter, we’ve registered one…
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What (and when) are the most popular US cities to visit?
For some business reasons, I need to check what the most popular tourists destinations in the US are. It is not hard to find such data. The US National Travel and Tourism Office complied overseas visitor data which will shed some light on our questions. Here is the data link, in case you like to…
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What is Your Favorite Data Source?
My students and I recently began a crowd-sourcing project – To collect some of the most worthy data-centric websites, so that others can learn and share as well. We need your help too! To contribute, just go the document below and type away! (If the table below does not work, here is the direct link)…
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All Great Boston Area Towns Benefitting from the Housing Boom? Not Quite So
I recently came across an interesting summary table on median condo prices in the Great Boston area (re-created in Excel below; original data from the Boston Magazine, whose link is here) Median prices probably are probably a good measure instead of averages because they might be skewed by very expensive high-end buildings. Nevertheless I was…
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How to calculate Time Difference in Excel
Microsoft Excel has a function to calculate the numbers of days between two dates (DATEDIF), but there is no specific function to compute the hours and minutes between two times. Instead, you simply take the difference. But there are some issues to deal with. Let’s look at an example. The problem here is the format…
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You Draw It: How Family Income Affects Children’s College Chances
New York Times has this super-interesting article, partly because of its interactive nature: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/05/28/upshot/you-draw-it-how-family-income-affects-childrens-college-chances.html The article begins: ” How likely is it that children who grow up in very poor families go to college? How about children who grow up in very rich families? We’d like you to draw your guess for every income level…