How to pry public records from a reluctant agency

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    • Tip sheet: Requesting public recordsDownload
    How to pry loose data in public recordsDownload

    Government databases are public records, yet most agencies treat records requests for data as something exotic and fraught with challenges. Anticipate the objections and defeat them for the win. Conversation led by Steve Suo and Nick Penzenstadler of the USA TODAY investigations team.

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    Google Fact-Check Explorer, Google Public Data Explorer, Google Trends, Google search shortcuts/advanced search), MapChecking for crowd size estimates, PhantomBuster, VisualPing for tracking website updates and other cool tools and hacks.

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    • Microsoft Excel 05 – What if

    The more data you have, the more questions you will have about it, and the more answers it can provide. Excel has a variety of conditional formulas that let you evaluate subsets of your data to find the stories to tell: If…Then formulas; Conditional Functions; XLOOKUP; Array Functions.

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