What you need to know for Week 7

1. Read the following:

• Moss – 2021 – Five Times Excel Led to Disaster
• Redman – 2013 – Data’s Credibility Problem
• Rosenblum and Dorsey – 2014 – Knowing Just Enough about Relational Databases
• Tableau – Guide to data cleaning

2. Take Quiz.

3. Look over class materials for 3/11. Note that we have an assignment due that Friday, but unlikely to provide a lot of class time to completing it this time. It may be beneficial to look over 7.2 in class assignment as well as assignment 2.

4. Assignment 2: Data cleansing in Excel due 3/15, 3 p.m. Vandelay spreadsheet. Will need spreadsheet as well as answer sheet emailed to me.

5. Additional stuff.

What is a Relational Database?

This video demonstrates differences between a relational database and an Excel spreadsheet for storing data:

https://youtu.be/iKK3P11OCyM

How Bad Data Ruins Your Day

Here are some of my favorite horror stories how things went wrong due to bad data:

https://www.simscale.com/blog/2017/12/nasa-mars-climate-orbiter-metric/

(A blog post with examples – including the classic NASA mishap – of how things go wrong when people get data types wrong.)