Tag Archives: spreadsheets

Dealing with dates as data in Excel

Posted on July 2, 2014 by cbahlai

This post is not about dating, as in romantic entanglements, although lots of scientists I know collect data on the dates they go on.* But like dates of the human variety, dealing with dates, as in those pesky things that … Continue reading →

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Getting meta

Posted on May 2, 2014 by cbahlai

Friends, your resident bug-counter has been, unh, busy lately. I’ve been travelling a lot over the past two months, between interviews for faculty positions and conferences. And it’s not over- I’ve got two more trips in May. So far, I’ve … Continue reading →

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Guest post- About Style

Posted on February 24, 2014 by cbahlai

Things have been a bit crazy lately in the bug counting lab. There’s a few personnel moving on to new things, and I’m in a rush to get projects wrapped up with them before I’m no longer interacting with them … Continue reading →

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Cleaning up your act: simple ways to find errors in your raw data

Posted on December 28, 2013 by cbahlai

It’s been an interesting week. We had a massive ice storm in the eastern Great Lakes area, trees and power lines were totaled, power was out everywhere- I didn’t have electricity for four days. Things, basically, are a disordered mess, … Continue reading →

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Formatting your data tables for storage and re-use

Posted on December 18, 2013 by cbahlai

If you follow me on twitter, you probably know I’m compiling a huge dataset. I’ve used a variety of tools to work on these data (most notably reshape and OpenRefine), and now the data is in its cleanest form- a … Continue reading →

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Excel is not your lab notebook

Posted on December 16, 2013 by cbahlai

Almost every entomologist I know uses excel for data storage. I’m not going to turn this into a rant about why that’s wrong, in fact, I’m going to confess something that may seriously impair my street cred* as a data … Continue reading →

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