Tech Tips

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...

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 ...