Most spreadsheets look terrible. Spreadsheet tools focus on complex computation at the expense of good design. As data practitioners our job is just as much about calculating an answer as it is communicating that answer. For that reason, it’s important we overcome the poor design support and make our spreadsheets readable and understandable.
I find it a pain to fiddle with the styling panels to get spreadsheets to look a particular way. …
It always starts with an innocent observation. “We get a lot of traffic from Boston,” your boss remarks. You naturally throw out a guess or two and discuss why that might be. Until your boss drops the bomb —
“Can you dig into that?”
Darn it. You walked right into that one.
Now you’re in a predicament. You know Google Analytics has traffic by geographic location, but that’s not gonna cut it. If you want to report on those retention rates, lifetime values, or repeat behaviors by geo, you need something you can query with SQL, something that lives in…
TJ Murphy
Head of Data for the largest streaming platform you’ve never heard of. Previously @imgur, @minted, @zynga.
