Publications by George Mount
How to unpivot a dataset in Excel Power Query vs R vs Python
What makes data clean? You may not be able to name those qualities, but you likely know messy data when you see it. In this blog post, we’ll look at a frequent offender: unpivoted data. You’ll learn what this is, how it can make for “tidier” data, and how to unpivot in Excel Power Query, R, and Python.For more on replicating and building ...
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Free workshop: Excel Power Query PDQ!
1 hour to Power Query in Excel (PDQ = Pretty Darn Quick!)It’s the most exciting Excel development in a generation… but you’d be forgiven for not knowing about it!OverviewThis free one-hour workshop will serve as an introduction to Power Query in Excel:How tables serve as the “missing link” between Excel and Power QueryHow Power Query se...
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The Best %^&@! Expletive Generator in R*
*Technically I think these are grawlixes, but this is a family blog anyway. Ever get so mad when you are working with data that you just want to scrawl out a long expletive in the middle of your coding? Ok, maybe it’s just me. I’m a mild-mannered guy but sometimes we all just need to let it rip on the keyboard. And let me tell you, holding do...
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Calculating Games Behind: “Max If” in R and Excel
In a recent post I walked through baseball’s Pythagorean theorem in Excel. I am finding baseball statistics a great post subject for a variety of reasons: it’s freely available, it can be analyzed in both R and Excel, and it’s something a little out the ordinary that allows us to think creatively about data. We will again make use of the fa...
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5 Ways to Get Help in R
In my mini-course, “5 Things Excel Users Should Know About R,” the fifth is more a point of encouragement than advice: don’t panic! (To learn about the other four, why not enroll for the mini-course yourself? It’s free.) There are numerous places to get stuck in R, many of them inside the program itself. I introduce a couple of them in ...
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A Tour of RStudio
In a previous post I explained how to install RStudio, a popular integrated development environment for the R programming language. Open up RStudio for the first time and it might look like some mad scientist’s Mission Control. In this post I will walk through each pane and what it does. From this you will start to see just what is so “integr...
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R Functions for Reproducible Data Frames
While there are many great resources to get help in R, sometimes you just need a second opinion. Here is where the many Internet help boards come in handy, most notably Stack Overflow. Start posting on Stack Overflow and you will soon learn the importance of the minimum reproducible example (MRE). Without one, you will likely even be refused “...
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Pivoting on Text in R (vs. Excel)
This post follows a previous tutorial on pivoting on text in Excel. In this post I will reproduce the exercise in R. This way you begin to see the similarities and differences of the program and begin to diversify your data skill base. Related: 5 Things Excel Users Should Know About R — Free Mini-Course Similar to the previous lesson, we will ...
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Data Entry with R’s Text Editor
Excel’s greatest strength — and its greatest weakness — is the ease of users to manipulate the basic data. Done well and the capability affords flexibility; done poorly and you are left with hard-coded cells and hidden Column A’s. With R you approach the data differently by writing each step in code. Generally you do not manipulate the b...
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Recap: Greater Cleveland R Users Lightning Talk
I am a regular attendee at the Greater Cleveland R Users Meetup and participated in the September 2018 Lightning Talks, in which a series of speakers gave ~8min presentations on talk running the gamut of R. My presentation came from the social science research world: statistical mediation. In my graduate program we performed these statistics on p...
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