Tech Tips

Institutional researchers are often tasked with synthesizing large amounts of data, perhaps by visualizing it in charts or summarizing it in tabular format. Allowing users to interact with these charts or tables by sorti...

As higher education institutions continue to recover from challenges presented by the pandemic, they are forced to grapple with persistent nationwide enrollment declines as well as student perceptions regarding the value...

LOOKUP, launched in 2019 by Microsoft, combines the functionality of multiple functions, including VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP, into a single source. It also offers the option to select a customized variable if no data are retur...

A key development in higher education over the past several decades is the growth of institutional research offices that function under the core principles of explaining what is happening now and attempting to shed light...

Visualizing geographic information helps data consumers quickly and easily derive insights and meaning. Institutional researchers, for example, may want to map students' home states or countries to help campus administra...

“I have a Zoom call at 3, so make sure you only enter my office if it is an emergency AND you are fully dressed.” A little less than a year ago, at the beginning of the pandemic, when people were talking a...

Gathering the Data A common request of our institutional research office is to combine data from multiple sources and varying formats. For example, we keep our demographic and academic information about our students in a...

There are many features in Microsoft Excel that go unnoticed. One of these features allows you to add flair to your data visualization with relative ease. When creating column charts in Excel, we often utilize the defaul...

Did you know there are many keyboard shortcuts built into Microsoft Office that can save you time and make your life easier? It’s time to get friendly with your Control key! Here are 25 “Ctrl&n...

While I primarily use Microsoft Excel’s Power Query Editor to put together a complicated table or report in a short period of time, I’ve learned that you can also use it to explore any data set. Here are the ...

In many circumstances, different text files are created with the same formats representing different groups or time periods. When multiple text files are held in a specific location, whether they are on a server, cloud, ...

If you’re looking for an excuse nowadays to spend more time inside on a computer, I recommend visiting the subreddit r/dataisbeautiful. Users submit all kinds of visualizations along with details of how they were c...

Whether you're new to Excel or breathe advanced formulae, there are always shortcuts and useful features to be discovered. Have you ever wanted a distinct count in pivot tables or an easier way to format complex workbook...

For information where online dashboards are not available, my office frequently uses pivot tables to visualize large sets of data for our stakeholders. Often times, we use the same data set for multiple visualizations li...

In Microsoft Excel, you’ve probably seen Power Pivot and Data Model, but have you discovered Power Query? Power Query is a tool introduced in 2013, which is available to all users who have Excel 2016 or later and/o...

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...