Dear Analyst

With an undergraduate degree in zoology and a master’s in public health, you wouldn’t expect Amanda Makulec to lead a successful career in data analytics and data visualization. As we’ve seen with multiple guests on the podcast, the path to a career in data analytics is windy and unexpected. It was the intersection of public […] The post Dear Analyst #126: How to data storytelling and create amazing data visualizations with Amanda Makulec appeared first on .

Sometimes pop culture and data analysis meet and the result is something interesting, thought-provoking, and of course controversial. How can one use data to prove definitely which Taylor Swift songs are the most underrated? Isn’t this a question for your heart to answer? Andrew Firriolo sought to answer this question over the last few months […] The post Dear Analyst #125: How to identify Taylor Swift’s most underrated songs using data with Andrew Firriolo appeared first on .

We sometimes forget that a large organization is composed of groups and divisions. Within these groups, there are teams and individuals looking to advance their careers. Sometimes at the expense of others. When your advancement depends on the success of your project, the benefits of that project to your company may be suspect and the […] The post Dear Analyst #124: Navigating people, politics and analytics solutions at large companies with Alex Kolokolov appeared first on .

When you think of data journalism, you might think of The New York Times’ nifty data visualizations and the Times’ embrace of data literacy for all their journalists. Outside of The New York Times, I haven’t met anyone who does data journalism and data storytelling full-time until I spoke with Ben Wylie. Ben is the […] The post Dear Analyst #123: Telling data stories about rugby and the NBA with Ben Wylie appeared first on .

There are only so many ways to make Excel “fun.” If you’ve been following this blog/podcast, stories about the financial modeling competition and spreadsheet errors that lead to catastrophic financial loss are stories that make a 1980s tool somewhat interesting to read and listen to. There are numerous tutorials and TikTok influencers who teach Excel […] The post Dear Analyst #122: Designing an online version of Excel to help Uber China compete with DiDi on driver incentives with Matt Basta appeared first on .

One of the more popular courses you could take at my college to fulfill the finance major requirements was Behavioral Finance. The main “textbook” was Inefficient Markets and we learned about how there are qualitative ways to value a security beyond what the efficient market hypothesis purports. During the financial crisis of 2008, psychology professor […] The post Dear Analyst #121: Fabricating and skewing Excel survey data about honesty with behavioral economists Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino appeared first on .

Data analytics and business analytics are still relatively new areas of study (in terms of academics). The subject borders business and computer science. When I went to school, the only data analytics classes available were special electives offered through our school’s continuing education department. In this episode, I spoke with Zach Wilner who currently leads […] The post Dear Analyst #120: Marketing attribution, sensitivity models, and building data infrastructure from the ground up with Zach Wilner appeared first on .

Future Dear Analyst episodes will get more sporadic since, well, life gets in the way. Unfortunately curiosity (in most cases) doesn’t pay the bills. Nevertheless, when I come across an idea or person that I think is worth sharing/learning more about, I’ll try my best to post. In this episode, I interview the Chief Scientist […] The post Dear Analyst #119: Developing the holy “grail” model at Lyft, user journeys, and hidden analytics with Sean Taylor appeared first on .

No, this isn’t an episode about how Facebook’s algorithm and feed works. The data science function is popping up in companies small and large given the amount of data swimming around. No other company understand the power and influence that data science can have on the customer experience than Facebook (Meta, to be exact). Akos […] The post Dear Analyst #118: Uncovering trends and insights behind Facebook News Feed, Reels, and Recommendations using data science with Akos Lada appeared first on .

The Google Workspace team announced a slew of Google Sheets functions a few months ago (February 2023). These functions look familiar and that’s because Microsoft Excel released most of them two years ago. I never had a chance to play around with the new functions in Excel since I don’t have the latest Office 365 […] The post Dear Analyst #117: New 2023 Google Sheets functions for data manipulation that already exist in Excel appeared first on .

This news is a bit old but I figured it’s juicy enough to talk about its future implications on Excel and artificial intelligence in general. Mid-March 2023, Microsoft announced Copilot, it’s artificial intelligence bet that will supposedly change the way we work. The video discusses how Copilot integrates with Office 365 and all your Microsoft […] The post Dear Analyst Episode #116: Will Microsoft’s AI Copilot for Excel replace the need for analysts? appeared first on .

Counting the number of colored cells or formatted cells in Google Sheets or Excel seems like it should be a basic operation. Unfortunately after much Googling, it doesn’t seem as easy as it looks. I came across this Mr. Excel forum thread where someone asks how to count the number of rows where there is […] The post Dear Analyst #115: How to count the number of colored cells or formatted cells in Google Sheets appeared first on .

When you think of data pipelines, data warehouses, and ETL tools, you may be thinking about some large enterprise that is collecting and processing data from IoT devices or from a mobile app. These companies are using tools from AWS and Google Cloud to build these complex workflows to get data to where it needs […] The post Dear Analyst Episode #114: How a small real estate investment company uses modern data and cloud tools to make data-driven decisions appeared first on .

It’s that time of the year again where data professionals look at their data predictions from 2022 and decide what they were wrong about and think: “this must be the year for XYZ.” Aside from the fact that these type of predictions are 100% subjective and nearly impossible to verify, it’s always fun to play […] The post Dear Analyst #113: Top 5 data analytics predictions for 2023 appeared first on .

This is a re-broadcast of an episode of the Secret Ops podcast hosted by my friend Ariana Cofone. Ariana is an operations consultant and her podcast is all about business operations. While I’ve never officially held a “business operations” role, I’ve worked in roles that are related to the operations world. In this conversation, we […] The post Dear Analyst #112: Greatest lessons learned from building solutions and processes for humans (re-broadcast of Secret Ops) appeared first on .

One topic that hasn’t been covered on Dear Analyst is master data management (MDM). I’m surprised it took this long before someone brought it up. I’ve never heard of the term before and it looks like it’s a core strategy for many large corporations for manager their data. Korhonda Randolph studied systems engineering at the […] The post Dear Analyst #111: Master data management at AutoTrader and working with data in a merger with Korhonda Randolph appeared first on .

Have you ever faced a spreadsheet where one column contains values for each “section” of the spreadsheet but you want to fill those values down through the rest of the column? This is a common problem when you get a data dump from a database or perhaps a copy/paste from a PivotTable. You have values […] The post Dear Analyst # 110: A tutorial on how to fill values down with Excel VBA and Google Apps Script (Vancouver Power BI/Modern Excel re-broadcast) appeared first on .

Johnson & Johnson is one of the largest corporations in the world and they produce everything from medical devices to baby powder. They were also on the front lines of developing a vaccine during the pandemic. Internally, J&J is also at the forefront of digital transformation. Sarfraz Nawaz studied computer science and built data analytics […] The post Dear Analyst #109: Data strategy and optimizing the vaccine supply chain at Johnson & Johnson with Sarfraz Nawaz appeared first on .

This episode is a re-broadcast of a podcast I did with Bassem Dghaidi, a senior software engineer at GitHub. Bassem has a podcast and YouTube channel called Glich. On his show, he covers moderate to advanced engineering topics on coding, architecture and management. Data analytics is a little outside of the topics he generally talks […] The post Dear Analyst #108: Skills needed for a successful data analytics career (Glich podcast re-broadcast) appeared first on .

Matthew Brandt didn’t know analytics was a potential career option until he started managing websites with Google Analytics. Matthew is Canadian, spent most of his life in Switzerland, and went to high school in Japan. He attended the EHL hospitality school at Lausanne, and was part of the 70% who left the hospitality field after […] The post Dear Analyst #107: Using Twitch to teach people about analytics and launching a food tech startup with Matthew Brandt appeared first on .