Blog #2 - Days 1-3

     I have spent the past three days at Vertical Knowledge learning the basics of data analysis.

    On Day 1, Ben sent over a huge spreadsheet of data on Microsoft Excel detailing all the vehicle listings on a website called RV Trader. This is one of the hundreds of websites/companies from which his company collects public data, and Ben wanted me to start off by figuring out how to find values such as the number of RV listings and average price by condition, make, region, etc. By the end of the day, I had learned how to use both formula calculations and pivot tables in Microsoft Excel in order to obtain the information I needed.

    Day 2 was an information-packed day because Ben had several meetings to go to, so I started off the day by learning a new function in Excel called "vlookup," which basically allows you to locate a value in a table given a particular input (pretty useful!). Then, he paired me up with one of his coworkers named Alex. A mathematical genius, Alex first taught me how to convert between binary, decimal. and hexadecimal number systems because it often comes up in computer programming. He then showed me the website that he created for the company that stores and analyzes all of the data that they collect. Finally, he taught me the basics of writing code in Python. As someone who has never taken a coding class in my life, I would be lying if I said I wasn't pretty confused, but it was really interesting, and I think I am slowly picking it up.

    Finally, Day 3 was really fun to me because Ben introduced me to a new data analysis platform called "Tableau," which he described as "Excel on steroids." I watched some training videos on how to use the website, and then I messed around with it for a bit to see what kind of data visualizations I could create with the RV Trader data from Days 1 and 2. 

    I have learned a LOT over the course of these past three days, so I am very much looking forward to what this next week will have in store.











Learning the basics of Python!

A data visualization I made using Tableau!


Comments

  1. AnonymousMay 25, 2022 at 4:36 AM

    The rate of learning sounds awesome, Tommy. Isn't it fun to be a bit more in control and be able to learn what you want to learn to solve the problems/questions that you have? I only learned vlookup last year so you're several years ahead of me. What's amazing is that coders have built this kind of functionality into so many other applications (Powerpoint, Excel, html). Once you realize what is available, a whole world of tools opens up to help make more sense of data and information, regardless of the professional field. Way to give your all to the experience and to learn as much as you can and have.

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