Intermediate

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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    • Business tools and investigating companies

    Learn how to scrape real-time and historical stock data from Google Finance into a Google Sheet and track it. It’s useful for anyone covering a specific industry or company.

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    • Investigating Nonprofits

    Learn how to read a Form 990 and where/how to go about obtaining these documents to track how money flows through non-profit organizations. We’ll also look at other tools for researching charities and also government agencies that investigate them.

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    • Data visualization: Flourish 201/301

    Easily turn your data into stunning charts, maps and interactive visuals for your stories. We will unlock the advanced features and settings in Flourish that will help you animate and bring your stories to life, while remaining true to our styles and branding.

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    • Build your own reporting robot

    How to use the automation function of Github, a tool for programmers, to create a web scraping bot to automatically gather information and data from the web. Our example will be using it to automate a tedious beat check. No prior coding knowledge needed.

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    • Protected: Google Earth tools for your newsroom

    There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

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    • Identifying discrimination through data

    Jayme Fraser of the I-Team and Robbie Gutierrez of the DOT will show how to pick out patterns hiding in data sets.

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    • Reporting with Pinpoint

    Learn how to probe through millions of documents, including audio, video, PDFs and more, to find patterns or that proverbial needle in a haystack. You’ll see case studies of how Gannett journalists have used this software to break big investigative stories.

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    • Backgrounding a business

    How to search for proxies and tools for covering business, non-profits and the economy overall.

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    • CSV Match and other fuzzy-matching tools

    Finds matches between two files rather than within one.

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    • Analyzing batches of PDFs

    Learn tools and techniques for working with data buried in PDF files.

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    • What do you mean, it’s “statistically significant?”

    Advanced math for journalists.

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    • The best data about inequality

    What are the best datasets out there and what stories can they tell?

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    • Unlocking the power of Excel pivot tables

    Slice and dice data to to organize your reporting, find patterns and reveal better stories.

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    • Data visualization introduction

    Visualizations can help make a complex story simpler. Play with simple data visualization tools, learn how to automatically import data into a map, and explore the elegant templates of Flourish.

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    • Introduction to using data in your reporting

    An overview of the key data analysis tools and techniques used to produce investigative stories, with examples of stories that were made possible with these tools.

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    • Backgrounding like a boss: Reporting on people and companies with free tools

    Even great reporters can get tricked by fake names or sketchy backgrounds. We’ll walk through some websites and strategies you can use to create a routine and spot potential red flags before you get burned.

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    • Advanced backgrounding of people and companies

    From Investigative Reporters and Editors, here’s how to build a deep well of background to inform your reporting and writing.

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    • Creating data visualizations

    In this quick clip, Maggie Farley discusses how to build visualizations that will engage and build trust with your audience. She demonstrates different tools to build quick data visualizations and animations.

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    • Reporting on farm bankruptcies in your own backyard

    Using a database created by Sky Chadde, the Gannett Agriculture Data Fellow at the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting, you’ll be able to localize the impact of these bankruptcies and identify trends in your community.

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    • Google: Geo and mapping

    Maggie Farley, a former Los Angeles Times foreign correspondent who now works with Google News Initiative, covers Geo and Mapping.

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