Tech Tips

Eight years ago, the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health (ASPPH) launched on online system of annual reporting and analytics for our member graduate schools and programs. Members were eager to stop repor...

I have been working on planning a conference for an organization and need to create a daily agenda. In the past, this task would be achieved by using some combination of cutting, pasting, and filling within Excel. Recent...

A MEDIAN IF array formula in Excel will identify the middle number of values that meet certain criteria. An array formula performs an operation on multiple values instead of a single value. In this array formula, we esse...

Figure 1. Ethnicity Table The columns I used for the chart were Ethnicity, Georgia Percentage Positive, Georgia Percentage, and College Percentage (Figure 2). Excel 2016 is the software used to construct the chart. The ...

There are usually some of the same variables (gender, birthdate, etc.) included in multiple data files that your office collects or maintains. Instead of duplicating the syntax in the syntax file for each data file, a sm...

Our institutional research analysts frequently extract data and modify the structure of data using SQL to suit the needs of data consumers or to ease analysis. Often, we need to aggregate tables containing multiple rows ...

As data scientists and university employees we cannot underestimate the value of extra time. Having said that, we also understand the importance and value behind spending time discovering data and communicating its insig...

Given that a picture is worth 1,000 words, there will be occasions when you want to make your data visualization show more than just a standard chart. Microsoft Excel offers an easy way to address this by producing a com...

The tidyverse is a set of tools in the programming language, R, for data wrangling, modelling, and visualization. There are a number of functions that allow data to be “read in” from multiple formats, transfo...

Surveys in higher education often target students at different levels of their degrees, which makes survey design tricky. Qualtrics has a useful feature to dynamically adapt survey questions to meet the survey requireme...

When you download Tableau Desktop, by default Tableau adds a file folder to your documents folder called “My Tableau Repository.” This folder contains data and options for your desktop application. In additio...

Preparing documents for an accreditation visit can be a stressful task. It involves many people and lots of last minute edits. Your institution may have thought ahead and prepared a website or intranet site where the ind...

Many of us use Microsoft Access to extract data from Banner or other enterprise systems, or to store data that doesn’t fit in our enterprise system. This tip provides an overview of the criteria field in Access que...

Analysts use visualizations to deliver complicated information in an easy to understand way. Dual axis function in Tableau helps users to be efficient with a message of visualization. Another name for a chart with a dual...

Scenario: You are developing an Excel dashboard based off a Pivot table or tables and you have multiple slicers to allow different combinations of data disaggregation, as in the image below. Everyone oohs and ahs un...

Last fall, I had the opportunity to present my survey automation project using Python and Qualtrics at the Pacific Northwest Association for Institutional Research and Planning (PNAIRP). With my friend, we have since tur...

When we report large numbers (especially related to financials), the default number formatting in Excel does not show up nicely in tables or charts, making it hard to read in a glance. One way to address this is to use c...

Learn how to make Pivot Tables, VLOOKUP, and absolute/relative formula references work harder. I’m sure we’ve all been faced with the need to create a quick analysis/fishing expedition of some sort, and the ...