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- 🤓 Learn Excel in 2 hours for data analysts
🤓 Learn Excel in 2 hours for data analysts
Read Time: 2 minutes
Hey crunchers! The Query here — the data newsletter that’s like an inner join
for your data career. We help you find the right match and avoid those pesky null
values.
Here’s what we have for you today:
Top data visualization interview questions 🙋
An EPIC dataset of the week showing global internet users 🌍️
The most common pattern for exploring data in SQL
A meme most of us can all relate to
def learn_data_analysis(👨💻):
1. Learn Excel the fast way. 6 projects in 2 hours.
Learning by doing is by far the most effective way to learn a new skill.
And Excel is really THE foundational technical skill for all of data analysis, so it’s important you learn it and learn it well.
FreeCodeCamp created an incredible course to introduce you to Excel by building 6 projects, all in 2 hours.
2. Top data visualization interview questions
If you’re learning Tableau, PowerBI, or are in the process of interviewing, it’s helpful to know what kind of questions you’ll be asked in an interviewing setting about data visualization.
This article by Interview Query walks you through some of the most common questions and what you need to know to answer them.
select * from dataset-of-the-week
The internet changed the world.
And it’s continuing to do so.
This week’s dataset of the week is called Global Internet Users by Ashishraut64 and would be a really cool dataset to use for a project.
It contains the following columns:
Entity - the name of the countries and regions.
Code - info about country code and where code has the value 'Region', it denotes division by grouping various countries.
Year - years from 1980-2020
Cellular Subscription - Mobile phone subscriptions per 100 people. This number can get over 100 when the average person has more than one subscription to a mobile service.
Internet Users(%) - The share of the population that is accessing the internet for all countries of the world.
No. of Internet Users - Number of people using the Internet in every country.
Broadband Subscription - The number of fixed broadband subscriptions per 100 people. This refers to fixed subscriptions to high-speed access to the public Internet (a TCP/IP connection), at downstream speeds equal to, or greater than, 256 kbit/s.
You could create some sweet time series visualizations and for bonus points, cross walk this data with another dataset (joining on year) showing the relationship between the two (e.g. GDP of various countries as they come online, etc.).
class MiniLesson:
The Most Common Pattern for Exploring Data with SQL
As a data analyst, exploring and understanding your dataset is crucial before diving into more complex analysis.
One common pattern for exploring data is to find the most frequent values for a specific column, ranked from top to bottom.
Here's a SQL tip for finding the most common values for a column in your dataset.
Let's consider an example where we have a table named orders with the following data:
In this example, the query returns the product categories and their respective frequencies, ordered by frequency in descending order.
This helps us quickly identify the most common product categories in our dataset.
One other tip is you can try to GROUP BY 1 ORDER BY 2, instead of typing the column names explicitly. Not every SQL environment supports this but it can make your query cleaner and faster to write.
As a beginner data analyst, using this pattern for exploring your data will enable you to better understand your dataset and make more informed decisions during your analysis.
It's a simple yet effective way to quickly gain insights into the distribution of values within your data.
import memes as 😂
Our Content & Resources 🤓
1. Download our SQL Cheatsheet as a PDF and desktop wallpaper here.
3. Courses: Our course on showcasing your data portfolio is live!
That’s it for today.
Stay crunchin’ folks and see you next week!
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