Chapter 2: Basic Data Analysis Techniques

Overview

Before you begin analyzing data with applications such as Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access, the Microsoft Office Web Components, and Microsoft Data Analyzer, you should understand basic data analysis techniques—for example, sorting, summarizing, trending, filtering, and formatting. In this chapter, I’ll provide an overview of these techniques. I’ll describe how to use these and more advanced data analysis techniques in specific applications in later chapters.

Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you should be able to

• Understand the basic data analysis concepts of sorting, filtering, formatting, querying, charting, and pivoting data.

• Understand the basics of importing and exporting data.

• Perform basic tasks with data lists, relational and hierarchical data, and XML data.