I come across a lot of people who proudly proclaim that they are not “data people.” They avoid spreadsheets, they hate columns of numbers, and they claim to get confused easily amidst it all. I’m here to help them all understand – data is your friend and everyone is a data person.
Let’s start with a simple clarification about what “data” is. Data is simply information. It doesn’t have to be a million line spreadsheet, it can be the text of an email. Data is any recorded and referencable piece of information. That’s it. If you go through your email for the number of times you were asked a question, you are doing data analysis.
The common misunderstanding with data is that you need to know everything about Excel to be able to be a data person. Here there is a misunderstanding of the difference between raw data and formatted data. Anyone can work with formatted data but raw data is a different animal.
Raw data is that information which comes in that hasn’t been cleaned, checked, validated, or organized. This process of turning raw data into formatted data is not something that anyone should do. You have to understand the original intent of the data, understand relational data standards, and generally be comfortable inside of data tools. This is a specialized activity.
After the data is formatted, it’s now anyone’s to work with. At this point, working with data largely comes down to asking questions and using the data to answer those questions.
The basic skill set of many jobs can be boiled down to “knowing what questions to ask and getting the right answers.” Those answers may come from experience, reading tea leaves, interviewing other experts, or (most commonly) analyzing the data. If you know what questions to ask, you are 75% of the way to being good at working with data.