2015 in review and a look forward to 2016

Wow, that time of year again! Time flies.

New Year's Eve Fireworks
New Year’s Eve fireworks by: Christine Matthews

2015

2015 was a year of huge growth, both personally and in a work capacity.

By far the biggest event of 2015 (or in fact, life so far) was the birth of my son which has enriched and changed life in so many ways. It’s been challenging to figure out how to care for and nurture a new human being. Balancing that with rest of life hasn’t been easy for my wife and me. But we’re finding our feet as new parents and the experience is so special that it trumps anything else. When he smiles back or laughs it makes every night ops session worth it.

In a work capacity in 2015, I focussed on establishing a freelance career in data analytics through client work and teaching for General Assembly. Early in the year, I expanded my technical skills with a foray into web development but things really took off for me when I doubled-down on my true work passion – making sense of data.

I worked with Excel, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Google Sheets, Geckoboard and Tableau for client projects and at General Assembly, teaching data analytics to students.

Some of the highlights of 2015:

  • Teaching Data Analytics and Excel courses for General Assembly was a fantastic experience. I’m delighted to continue into 2016, teaching these courses again.
  • All sorts of interesting client work, including building dashboards and SQL data analysis projects.
  • Learning web development through building several web applications, using d3, Rails and Javascript.
  • Finally building that Excel dashboard of US Political data that I had in the back of mind for far too long.
  • Figuring out a workaround using CSS and text widgets to create pie charts in a Geckoboard dashboard. This was undoubtedly the most detailed and time consuming side project of the year, but for that reason one of the most satisfying!
  • And finally, on a personal level, publishing stories and photos from the 2014 climbing trip to the beautiful Rocky Mountains – Part 1 and Part 2.

2016

I love the first few days of January, when the whole year stretches ahead and the options seem limitless. I’m really excited about 2016 and the work projects I have planned. It’s going to build on the foundations I laid in 2015, as I expand the teaching, client and website offerings.

Specifically, I have a couple of digital products launching in the first quarter, which I can’t wait to share. Watch this space!

So, goals for 2016:

  • Teach Data Analytics and Excel courses for General Assembly again. I’m signed up to teach the cohort starting on January 30th.
  • Launch my first ebook, featuring all of the most interesting, weird and wonderful spreadsheet tricks I’ve come across. I’ve nearly finished writing it and can’t wait to share it. It’s been hugely fun to research and write. Coming your way soon!
  • Launch my own dashboard course, likely through Udemy. I’m working on my first digital course which I plan to launch in the first quarter of this year. Again, I’m really excited about this.
  • Write more frequently on this blog. This website is critical to my business since the majority of my leads come through it, so I’m going to make a big push to create lots of interesting and valuable content on here this year.
  • Do more public speaking. I enjoyed speaking at GA’s graduation event last year and would love to speak at some events or meetups this year. It’s a great way to meet new people and share ideas with an interested audience.

What’s my secret mantra for 2016?

Focus!

This was my biggest single takeaway from last year. Things really started to move for me when I zeroed in on a niche and poured my heart and soul into it. So I plan to keep this in mind, stay focussed and avoid distractions this year.

So cheers to big things happening this year!

Happy New Year and all the best for 2016!

Cheers,
Ben

Excel tutorial: Building a dynamic, animated dashboard for U.S. political data

Excel dynamic dashboard screenshot

Who doesn’t love a dynamic, animated Excel dashboard?

Here’s one I’ve been working on recently, a data visualization of historical U.S. political data, showing party trends, state populations and sitting presidents over time:

Excel Dynamic Dashboard - US Political data

In the following post, I delve into the details of how I created this dashboard. It’s not a full cell-by-cell account of how I did it, because that would require an article at least twice as long, but rather a look at the various steps and thought processes along the way.

If it appears a little ragged, that’s because it probably is! Most likely because I’m writing this bleary eyed at 1am, between feeds and diaper changes of my 6 week old son. 😉

Continue reading Excel tutorial: Building a dynamic, animated dashboard for U.S. political data

Using Google Sheets as a basic web scraper

Want to build a web scraper in Google Sheets? Turns out, basic web scraping, automatically grabbing data from websites, is possible right in your Google Sheet, without needing to write any code.

You can extract specific information from a website and show it in your Google Sheet using some of Sheets’ special formulas.

For example, recently I needed to find out the authors for a long list of blog posts from a Google Analytics report, to identify the star authors pulling in the page views. It would have been extremely tedious to open each link and manually enter each author’s name. Thankfully, there are some techniques available in Google Sheets to do this for us. Continue reading Using Google Sheets as a basic web scraper

10 Techniques for building a Google Sheets Dashboard

You’re probably familiar with using Google Sheets to organize and analyze your data. But did you know you can build a dynamic Google Sheets dashboard to really understand your data?

With a handful of powerful techniques, you can add some pizzazz and dynamism to the presentation of your data. Here are ten tricks to try next time you’re building a Google Sheets dashboard.

Continue reading 10 Techniques for building a Google Sheets Dashboard