Frequently Asked Questions
What this playlist answers
30 questions this playlist covers — skim
them for a quick takeaway, or dive into the videos above for the full picture.
Data literacy is the ability to read, write, translate, and think about data — treating data as a language that must be learned symbol by symbol, the same way you'd learn a foreign alphabet, in order to understand and communicate what data is really saying.
The four skills are reading data (interpreting charts, dashboards, and tables), writing data (creating analyses and visualizations with tools like Excel), translating data (communicating findings clearly to non-technical audiences), and thinking about data (asking critical questions about whether the data is trustworthy and what it actually means).
Because bar height is read as proportional to the value it represents, starting the axis above zero exaggerates the visual difference between bars and can make a small real difference look enormous — for example, making a 1-2 percentage point election lead look like a landslide. Valid exceptions exist only when there's a meaningful non-zero reference point, such as the freezing point on a temperature chart, and this should be labeled clearly.
A workbook is the entire Excel file. A worksheet is one tab (sheet) inside that file — the same way a book contains multiple pages. A new workbook starts with one worksheet, but you can add more by clicking the plus icon, and each worksheet can hold different data.
Combine the column letter and row number, such as E7 for column E, row 7 — similar to calling out a coordinate in the game Battleship. Columns are labeled with letters (A, B, C… continuing to AA, AB, etc.) and rows with numbers; these labels are fixed and can't be renamed.
A relative reference shifts automatically to match a formula's new position when copied to another cell. An absolute reference — created by putting a dollar sign before the column letter, row number, or both (e.g., $B$2) — stays locked to that exact cell no matter where the formula is copied. Use absolute references for values that shouldn't change (like a fixed cost), and leave references relative when they should update per row (like a page count that differs by book).
VLOOKUP (vertical lookup) searches down the first column of a range for a match and returns a value from a column to its right in that same row. Its main limitation is that it can only return values located to the right of the lookup column — it cannot look up and return a value that sits to the left.
INDEX MATCH combines two functions — INDEX returns a value at a given row/column position within a range, and MATCH finds the position of a lookup value within an array. Together they can return a value from any column relative to the lookup column, including columns to the left, which VLOOKUP cannot do. Neither function is definitively "better" — each can be more convenient depending on where the data you need sits relative to your lookup value.
Use FALSE (or 0) for an exact match, and TRUE for an approximate match. Most real-world lookups — around 95% of the time — call for an exact match, so FALSE is the far more common choice; leaving the argument blank also defaults to an approximate match in some functions, so it's safer to type FALSE or 0 explicitly.
LEFT extracts a specified number of characters counting from the beginning (left side) of a text string. Spaces count as characters when counting position.
RIGHT extracts a specified number of characters counting from the end (right side) of a text string, though the extracted text still prints in its original left-to-right order. Spaces count as characters.
MID extracts characters from any position within a text string, given a starting character position and the number of characters to include. Like LEFT and RIGHT, spaces count as characters when determining position.
TRIM removes leading, trailing, and extra internal spaces from a text string, leaving single spaces between words. It's especially useful for messy data pulled from surveys or other systems, where hidden double spaces can silently break lookups and matching.
Wrap AND() around your conditions inside the IF statement if every condition must be true for a positive result, or wrap OR() around them if only one condition needs to be true. NOT() can be added to reverse a condition — for example, checking that a value is not equal to something.
The version without the 's' (COUNTIF, SUMIF, AVERAGEIF) evaluates a single condition. The version with the 's' (COUNTIFS, SUMIFS, AVERAGEIFS) evaluates multiple conditions at once — Excel allows up to 127 condition/range pairs — and only counts, sums, or averages rows where every condition is met.
Select your data, go to Insert and click PivotTable, then choose whether to place it in a new or existing worksheet. Drag fields from the field list into the Rows, Columns, Values, and Filters zones to summarize the data — for example, dragging a category into Rows and a numeric field into Values instantly sums that value for each category.
If any values in that column start with a letter or contain non-numeric characters (like an age-range label such as "5 to 9"), Excel treats the whole column as text and sorts it alphabetically rather than by numeric value. Reformatting the labels to be purely numeric (or consistently zero-padded) and re-sorting fixes the order.
A slicer is a clickable visual panel that filters a pivot table (and any charts built from it) interactively, staying visible at all times so viewers can see exactly what's selected. It's generally faster and more intuitive than a column filter dropdown, and multiple values can be selected at once by clicking and dragging or holding Ctrl.
No — a pivot table does not refresh live when its source data changes. You have to manually refresh it (via the refresh option) for the pivot table, and any charts built from it, to reflect the updated data.
Transposing converts each column into a row (or each row into a column) — it's a genuine reorganization of the data structure, not simply rotating the table's visual orientation. In Excel, you copy the selected data, then use Paste Special and check the "Transpose" option to convert it.
Select the column, go to the Data tab, and choose "Text to Columns." Choose "Delimited," then specify the character that separates the values (such as an exclamation point) under Custom, rather than the default space delimiter — Excel will insert a new column at each point the delimiter is found.
Correlation measures the strength and direction of a relationship between two numerical variables, expressed as a number from -1 to 1. A value close to 1 means a strong positive correlation (as one variable increases, so does the other); close to -1 means a strong negative correlation (as one increases, the other decreases); and close to 0 means little to no linear relationship. In Excel, it's computed with the CORREL function.
No — correlation does not imply causation. Two variables can be strongly correlated without one causing the other; there may be no real relationship at all (a spurious correlation), or both may be driven by a separate, unmeasured factor.
Use a scatter plot to examine the relationship between two numerical variables that don't have an inherent order or time component — for example, GDP per capita versus life expectancy by country. Use a line chart when there's a meaningful sequential or time-based variable (such as year) paired with a numerical variable, since a line chart connects points in a way that implies progression over that sequence.
Use a bar chart to precisely compare individual category values against each other, especially when there are many categories. Use a pie chart to show how each category relates to the whole (its relative frequency); pie charts work best with a small number of categories — generally no more than four — since more slices become too thin to read or compare accurately.
Absolute frequency is a raw count — how many times something occurs. Relative frequency is that count expressed as a share of the total — how often it occurs compared to everything else — shown as a percentage, fraction, or decimal. A pie chart's slices always represent relative frequencies and must add up to 100%.
Divide the one-time upfront cost by the net recurring savings per period. For example, if a machine costs $5,540 and generates $164.63 in net weekly savings, dividing $5,540 by $164.63 gives about 33.7 weeks — this is always rounded up to 34, since rounding down would report a breakeven point before the full cost has actually been recovered.
A year has 52 weeks, not 48 (4 weeks × 12 months). Scaling a monthly figure to an annual figure first (× 12) and then dividing by the true number of weeks in a year (÷ 52) distributes the cost accurately across all weeks; simply dividing the monthly amount by 4 understates the number of weeks per month on average and produces an inflated weekly figure.
A fixed cost is paid once (or stays constant regardless of usage) — such as the one-time purchase price of a machine. A variable cost changes based on some other factor, such as an hourly labor rate that increases the more hours are worked, or a per-unit packaging cost that scales with volume shipped.
SUMPRODUCT multiplies corresponding values from two (or more) equally sized ranges and then sums all those products — for example, multiplying each exam score by its point weight, row by row, then adding the results. Dividing that SUMPRODUCT result by the sum of the weight range gives a weighted average, letting you calculate something like a final grade from differently weighted exam scores without computing each product manually.
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