Spreadsheets for Social Scientists: Glossary

If you inherit data in a spreadsheet, you may have to re-structure the data to make it usable and/or consistent

Careful design of your own spreadsheets will make then easily usable and portable to other systems

Heading lines may contain information relevant to the rows below it and needs to added to each of them

There may be multiple heading lines with different information in each

Avoid using multiple tables within one spreadsheet.

Avoid spreading data across multiple tabs (but do use a new tab to record data cleaning or manipulations).

Record zeros as zeros.

Use an appropriate null value to record missing data.

Don’t use formatting to convey information or to make your spreadsheet look pretty.

Place comments in a separate column.

Record units in column headers.

Include only one piece of information in a cell.

Avoid spaces, numbers and special characters in column headers.

Avoid special characters in your data.

Record metadata in a separate plain text file.

Metadata is essential to the understanding of the data.

Internally dates are stored as numbers

Some dates may be mis-interpreted by the spreadsheet program

Splitting dates into components can make life easier

In general you can type any kind of data into any cell in a spreadsheet

Excel does provide tools which allow you to restrict the type of data and ranges of values you can enter

Using Excel tables can make data entry simpler, by automatically inserting new rows complete with data validation rules when needed