I’m a data junkie – give me a few thousand (or million 0r whatever) rows of information and I’ll be happy for awhile going through it and finding the patterns and connections. Over time I’ve learned that most people don’t enjoy spending their time this way (it still shocks me!).
For those that do follow this fine art of number crunching – or those simply forced to as a task – the key is to keep at it even after you think you’ve found everything you can find. I like to create approximately 2 summary tables for each 1,000 rows of data or 5 columns. As each of those numbers grow, expand the summary tables. Most of the summaries you create will be worthless and not show a relationship, but some will. Those that show relationships where you least expect them are where the value is.