Excel Tips and Techniques

Here's a neatly organized set of Excel tips and techniques.

Generic Names for Soft Drinks by County

Now here's a significant U.S. map: Generic Names for Soft Drinks by County. Do you say pop, Coke, soda or something else? As a native Californian who's lived in Florida, New Jersey, North Carolina, Massachusetts, New York, Alaska, Singapore and Kentucky, I'm hopelessly confused about what to say.

Worldometers.info

worldometers.info attempts to show continuously updated - and I mean truly continuously updated, as in real-time, like an odometer - numbers for the Earth's population, births, government expenditures, bicycles produced, calories consumed, lightning struck, soil erosion and more. But it acknowledges its limits when it warns, "Do not use for exact calculations."

Old City Directories Online

City Directories at DistantCousin.com offers free scanned images of old city directories from around the U.S.

Complete Sun and Moon Data for One Day

At this Navy site you can "obtain the times of sunrise, sunset, moonrise, moonset, transits of the Sun and Moon, and the beginning and end of civil twilight, along with information on the Moon's phase by specifying the date and location ... "

lifehack.org

lifehack.org is a "Daily digest and pointer on productivity, getting things done and lifehacks."

Photoshop lover

"Photoshop lover is your 1 stop photoshop tutorials and resource site. We have a huge collection of photoshop tutorials for photoshop users of all skill levels." Don't know why they can't be bothered to capitalize Photoshop.

HOW TO GPS Tag Photos: Flickr, Mappr, Google Earth....

Lots of good tips here on how how to tag photos with latitudes and longitudes and use them with Flickr, Mappr and Google Earth.

Disbarred contractor database "may be insufficient," GAO says

The Excluded Parties List System database is where federal agencies are supposed to go to find contractors whose have been suspended or disbarred from getting a piece of the more $300 billion a year the federal government spends on goods and services. In a report released today, however, the GAO says the database "may be insufficient" for that purpose. On reason, the GAO says, is that entries for contractors often don't include a unique contractor identification number, so if a contractor changes its name, an agency may not be able to find it in the database. Agencies can only do name searches, so “officials cannot always be fully confident that a prospective contractor is not on the list of excluded parties,” the GAO report says. The report also notes that agencies can continue to do business with suspended or disbarred contractors if they demonstrate “there is a compelling need for an excluded contractor's service or product." Two of the agencies it reviewed last year, the Air Force and Army, did just that and continued to do business with a total of five excluded parties.

Agripedia

"Agripedia is an Internet Accessible Interactive Multimedia Instructional Resource, developed by the University of Kentucky's College of Agriculture ... " Uh, OK. You mean it's an agriculture encyclopedia?

Newspaper does its own Google Maps gas price watch

This is probably just the beginning of newspapers taking advantage of the free use of Google Maps: The Times Herald-Record in New York state used Google Maps to create an online "Record Gas Watch" giving reader-contributed gas prices for stations in its area.

Hurricane Watch with Google Maps

As Hurricane Katrina blows through the Gulf now seems like a good time to point out how a newspaper reporter used Google Maps to produce a hurricane tracking map on his Web site. Matt Waite of the St. Petersburg Times explains here how he scraped data from the National Weather Service and fed it to Google Maps.

Teen Chat Decoder Software

I'll be needing this soon: The Teen Chat Decoder "'Cracks the Secret Teen Lingo code' your teen uses in Chat Rooms, Instant Messages, & Text Messages - for FREE!'"

Religious Movements Homepage Project

The Religious Movements Homepage Project at The University of Virginia is "an extensive Web site you will find detailed profiles of more than two hundred different religious groups and movements. Some of them may be very familiar to you, others not. In addition, there are other valuable resources, including information on 'cult' controversies, essays by respected scholars, and teaching resources on which interested visitors are invited to draw."

Comic characters data base

The comic characters data base.

The CIA summarizes world disputes

The CIA's World Factbook includes summarizes of disputes around the world.

NNDB: Notable Names Database

The Notable Names Database says it is "an intelligence aggregator that tracks the activities of people we have determined to be noteworthy, both living and dead. Superficially, it seems much like a 'Who's Who' where a noted person's curriculum vitae is available ... But it mostly exists to document the connections between people, many of which are not always obvious." Questions about its credibility on the news librarian list led one poster to link to a Wikipedia entry and a Web site for Soylent Communications, which registered the site's domain.

Community Information by Zip Code

California State University Northridge's library has a page that explains where you can find Community Information by Zip Code. Some of it is California specific, but there's lots on national data sources too and it includes a short section on "Strategies to Find More."

ReligionFacts.com

ReligionFacts.com claims to offer "Just the facts on world religions." It's by a doctoral student in religion. "Every effort has been taken to present material from an impartial, academic perspective," the webmaster writes. "This site has no mission other than to provide useful and interesting information on religion in an easy-to-use format. The general goal is to combine the benefits of a print encyclopedia of religion with the unique capabilities of the Web to create a convenient, one-stop online resource for information on religion."

Encyclopaedia Britannica RSS feed

The Encyclopaedia Britannica offers an RSS feed .

McMaster University Archive for the History of Economic Thought

The McMaster University Archive for the History of Economic Thought "is an attempt to collect in one place a large number of significant texts in the history of economic thought."

Repositories of Primary Sources

Repositories of Primary Sources offers "A listing of over 5000 websites describing holdings of manuscripts, archives, rare books, historical photographs, and other primary sources for the research scholar. "

Excel and Access data exchange add-ins

4TOPS makes rather pricey Excel add-ins that make it easier to import data from Excel to Access, from Access to Word or to compare Excel files.

Hospital Compare

Hospital Compare by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services lets you compare how hospitals across the U.S. treat different medical conditions. It's the basis for a piece by Ford Fessenden of The New York Times who says, "The data show that doctors and hospitals fail with alarming frequency to deliver essential lifesaving treatments for some of the most common causes of death - heart attack, pneumonia and heart failure."

The Revealer

The Revealer is "a daily review of religion and the press."

Work Magazine

Work Magazine "is a quarterly analysis of the U.S.A.'s work culture and its influence over the world."

Indeed

Indeed ("one search. all jobs" gathers help wanted ads from "job sites, newspapers, associations and company career pages" and makes them searchable in one place. It also lets people with programming skills hook into the site, allowing you to create things such as this "sneaky bastard" worksheet that lets you easily import searches into Excel. The New York Times thought enough of it to buy an interest (Indeed, that is, not the "sneaky bastard" worksheet).

Blogger for Microsoft Word

Blogger now as an add-in that lets you blog from within Microsoft Word.

People Finder Guide

The Virtual Chase offers a thorough and helpful People Finder Guide. It includes sections on public records and public information, reverse telephone directories, white pages and telephone directories, finding email addresses, white pages outside the U.S. and professional research databases.

A new dBase

And you thought it only survived as a file format: There's a new version of dBase out. It's hard to get excited about a database that touts "NATIVE support for Mouse Wheel" as one of its "most asked-for" new features.

Yotophoto free photo and image search

Yotophoto says it "is the first and only internet search engine for finding free-to-use stock photographs and images."

KIDS COUNT State-Level Data Online

You can now get the state-level data from the annual KIDS COUNT report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation online. The online database contains more than 75 measures of child well-being and can be customized by geographic area, including maps, rankings and line graphs. You can also get raw data files.

Free PDF converter

PrimoPDF lets you create a PDF from almost any program. And it's free.

Searching for blanks on Google

Google has improved the way it does wildcard searching using the asterisk ("searching for blanks"). To see what that means, try these examples offered on the Google blog: [the parachute was invented by *] and [Glasgow is the * capital of Europe]

Environment Writer Newsletter

Environment Writer focuses "on journalism on environmental and natural resources issues."

Subversive document control

PC Magazine has an article in its latest issue about using Subversion to track changes to documents. Normally programmers use the free Subversion to track changes to source code files, but PC Magazine says it could be a useful way for non-programmers to track changes to any kind of document.

GovExec.com

GovExec.com calls itself "government's business news daily and the premier Web site for federal managers and executives."

YouTube

YouTube lets you upload, tag and share videos, much like Flickr lets you do with photos. A baby eating a zucchini. Napoleon Dynamite impersonations. An ex-programmer dancing in front of the Taj Mahal. You don't need any more evidence than this that the great American experiment is in trouble.

Cmap Tools

Matt Waite of the St. Petersburg Times is impressed with his first introduction to Cmap Tools. Cmap tools could be useful for tracking the complex relationships between people and organizations by visually drawing the connections between them. Waite says it would also be useful for making investigative timelines. And it's free.

Scoopt

Scoopt asks, "Who will take tomorrow's front page photograph - a professional press photographer or a passer-by armed with a cameraphone?" Scoopt says it will represent amateur photographers who want to sell their newsworthy pics to newspapers, magazines and other media.

Mossberg on EverNote

The Wall Street Journal's Walter Mossberg writes today about EverNote ("EverNote Organizes Your Endless Stuff Onto an Endless Tape"), which I have been using the last few months as my primary information gathering tool.

ColorBrewer

"ColorBrewer is an online tool designed to help people select good color schemes for maps and other graphics. It is free to use, although we'd appreciate it if you could cite us if you decide to use one of our color schemes."

Questionable business climate indexes

The Economic Policy Institute casts a critical eye (PDF) on five widely used indexes -- The Small Business Survival Index, the Small Business Tax Climate Index, the Metro and State Competitiveness Report, The Fiscal Policy Report Card on America's Governors, and the Economic Freedom Index -- that claim to measure business climate and finds them wanting.

The underlying problem with the five indexes is twofold: none of
them actually do a very good job of measuring what it is they claim to
measure, and they do not, for the most part, set out to measure the
right things to begin with.

Calculated fields in pivot tables

How to do Calculated Fields in Excel Pivot Tables.

Google News RSS feeds

Google News now offers RSS feeds. You can customize your news and your feeds so you get news only on subjects you're interested in. Google explains here.

TradeSports Trading & Betting Exchange

TradeSports translates betting into a market where you buy or sell "contracts" based on what you think the likelihood is that something is going to happen. For example, you can buy or sell a contract that says the Yankee will win the World Series, and the trading reflects the waxing and waning of mass opinion on the chances that will happen. But TradeSports, despite the name, is not limited to just sports - you can trade contracts on whether the DOW will rise or fall, the U.S. Senate will confirm John Roberts for the Supreme Court, or which show will win the Emmy for best drama series. Lots of realtime data and graphics, and an interesting window on the future.

Access or Excel?

Here's guidance on when to use Excel and when to use Access to manage your data.

Graphic Exchange News

Graphic Exchange News offers "graphic resources for creative minds."

Yahoo! audio search

Yahoo! has a new audio search.

Gannett No. 1 in weeklies

Gannett is "now the No. 1 owner of U.S. weeklies," according to an analysis by the University of Kentucky's Institute for Rural Journalism & Community Issues. Using data from Editor & Publisher, the institute found that that the number of Gannett-owned weeklies rose from 122 to 207 during an 11-month period beginning last year.

Google for spreadsheets

AutomateExcel.com explains how to Google for spreadsheets. And ResearchBuzz explains how to take it another step or two.

Flat-footed old media

It's interesting to me that for a news story I was especially interested in - the Gannett/Knight-Ridder Detroit newspaper swap - I got more meaningful information and and got it faster from Romenesko than from major media like the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, the Washington Post or USA Today. As of 9:45 p.m. last night, those four publications had only perfunctory wire stories that told me little more than the official press releases. Romenesko had links to the press releases themselves, a rough transcript of Tony Ridder and other Knight-Ridder execs breaking the news to the Free Press staff, a Q & A on the sale copied from the Gannett intranet and letters from former Knight-Ridder editors commenting on the sale. Not to mention that a trade publication - Editor & Publisher - broke the story online a day earlier ...

Why I Will Never Have A Girlfriend

This has been bouncing around the Internet for a while, but this is the first time I've seen it: A geek offers irrefutable mathematical proof of "Why I Will Never Have A Girlfriend".

Portable hard drives for reporters?

The New York Times reported earlier this week that Time "asked their technology department to explore various options, including the possible development of a special portable hard drive that would let reporters remove all their notes from a company computer. That way, the company could say that it did not have access to such notes." This, of course, is fallout from the Valerie Plame affair. The NYT said news organizations are "trying to outwit a new generation of prosecutors and protect reporters and sources in what they believe to be an increasingly antagonistic environment." This was also discussed on Slashdot.

Attention data

Do you have rights to data businesses collect about your online habits? FeedDemon creator Nick Bradbury, a member of the board of AttentionTrust.org explains "attention data" and how "this data will increasingly impact those of us - journalists and techies alike - who hope to survive in the online world."

Taping checklist

Poynteronline offers a telephone taping checklist. ("Things to keep in mind before pressing the button.")

Opaque Web

Mary Ellen Bates on searching the "Opaque Web" - - "the vast amounts of information that search engines don't index, or at least don't index very well." She pays special attention to the recently unveiled Yahoo! Search Subscriptions, which lets you search Consumer Reports, FT.com, Factiva, Forrester Research, IEEE publications, Lexis-Nexis, New England Journal of Medicine, TheStreet.com and the Wall Street Journal for free, although you must pay to read the full articles.

Sprog

The free "Sprog is a graphical tool which anyone can use to build programs by plugging parts together. In Sprog jargon, the parts are known as 'gears' and they are assembled to make a 'machine'. The types of programs that you can build with Sprog will fit this general model: 1. Get some input data 2. Process the data 3. Output the result"

JournoList

"The JournoList is an annotated list of sites chosen to help
reporters, writers and editors make good use of the Internet."

Places & Spaces is both a traveling exhibit and an online demonstration of "the power of maps." "Come see with your own eyes the extent to which maps can be employed to help make sense of the flood of information we are confronted with and how domain maps can be used to locate complex and beautiful information," the site says.

A Guide to Federal Records in the National Archives of the United States.

How to make charts that automatically grow as you add data in Excel.