This class will cover the basics of Excel, from simple formulas (SUM, COUNTIF) to more complex Excel features like Macros and the Data Analysis ToolPak. By the end of both sections, students will be able to employ Excel skills to open source policy data sets. These skills are transferrable to any sector.

Topics Covered Will Include:

It is often said that 80% of data analysis is spent on the process of cleaning and preparing the data. This workshop will introduce tools (notably dplyr and tidyr) that makes data wrangling and manipulation much easier. Participants will learn how to use these packages to subset and reshape data sets, do calculations across groups of data, clean data, and other useful stuff.

Prior knowledge: Previous experience with (basic) R is assumed. Completion of D-Lab's R FUN!damentals workshop series should be sufficient.

This three-part series will cover the following materials:

Part 1:  Introduction

Raster data are used to represent geographic phenomena that are present and can be measured anywhere in a study area, like elevation, temperature, rainfall, land cover, soil type, etc. These data are a valuable resource for social scientists, planners, and engineers as well as natural scientists. This workshop will introduce basic raster concepts and methods for working with raster data in R. Participants will learn how to import and store raster data as spatial objects. We will explore methods for plotting rasters and manipulating raster data values.