Thursday, October 02, 2025
Analytics Education STEM

How to treat Excel like a database to do complex SQL-like queries

One of the most under-utilized, most powerful query features come from Excel’s database functions. While primary usage of Excel is more as a traditional spreadsheet, and it myriad of formulas (and VBA macros), the database functions allow us to treat it like a database and query from its dataset much like SQL statements would from […]

Read More
Analytics Education STEM Work

A Risk Assessment Map—my approach

I’ve seen many pretty risk assessment maps over time. The issue I see with most of them is that they’re more of an illustration than a method meaning, they’re customized visuals with manual graphics that don’t scale well for different projects. In the post, I’ll share my approach…it’s based on applying basic statistical concept, development […]

Read More
Analytics Education STEM

Measuring and visualizing performance from raw transactions

Scenario We have transactional data for 3 months. We want to compare any month’s sales performance with our goals by category of products sold. The following information is available in one dataset: OrderID, Product, qty, price, date of order as they occurred. As we see below, they’re not tallied or grouped or sorted in any […]

Read More
Analytics Education STEM

Using Stock Price Charts On Humans

Using the same dataset, I’ve shown in my earlier blog: Scattered Data To A Butterfly, Or A Tornado! https://flyingsalmon.net/blog/?p=2194 on how to present similar information visually and add interactivity, in this post, I’ll show other ways to present the information visually and walk through the pros and cons of each. I won’t be using any […]

Read More
Analytics Coding STEM

Scattered Data to a Butterfly, or a Tornado!

What do butterflies and tornadoes have in common? 🙂 Butterfly charts aka Tornado charts are a special type of Bar chart where the data categories are listed vertically instead of the usual horizontal layout. It’s suitable for comparing different variables between two groups (e.g. male/female, apartment/house, car/boat, etc. etc.) and what variables you measure is […]

Read More
Analytics Education STEM

Organizing raw dataset to creating impactful, interactive visualizations (Excel, PowerBI)

In this post, I’ll walk through the steps starting with a raw dataset that’s organized differently from what I need, to reshaping the data using Excel formulas, and creating an interactive visualization using PowerBI, to publishing it online using PowerBI. Excel and PowerBI work hand-in-hand to solve such problems effectively, and efficiently. First, I’ll start […]

Read More
Coding Education STEM

Interactive Text-To-Speech App with Presidents of USA (Python)

In this blog, I’ll discuss how to build an interactive lookup of data and have the results spoken back to you in human language. Specifically, I have a list of all POTUS to-date in a file (Excel, CSV, Text…they’ll work without any code design change). I want to be able to lookup the very first […]

Read More
Back To Top