My first excel data cleaning

rachel ngunjiri — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 15:33:15 +0000

As I have started my Data analysis and science curriculum, Microsoft excel is the first tool we have learnt. In my life before getting into this course, I used to underestimate the power of Microsoft excel.

Definition of Microsoft Excel

This is a spreadsheet software developed by Microsoft that allows you to collect, organize, analyze, calculate and visualize data efficiently.

The Excel Interface

When open Microsoft excel, you first an interface made of various tools
We start with the ribbon. The ribbon contains a toolbar that contains all the commands organized into tabs such, Home, Insert, Page Layout , Formulas, Charts and Data

There is a formula Bar that content and formulas appear. In addition, we have Quick access toolbar that contains icons for Save, Undo and Redo.

A row is a horizontal line of cells that runs from left to right across the grid while a column is a vertical line of cells that runs from top to bottom down the grid. A cell is where row and column intersect and form a single box.

Cleaning A Dirty Dataset

As we learnt about Data cleaning with Excel on dataset that was a bit very disorganized.

We first started with sorting that data which basically means arranging the data in specific order. The sorting can be Text sorting which is A-Z or Z-A, Number sorting which is from largest to small and vice versa, Date sorting which is Oldest to Newest and vice vera.

Next was filtering which allows you display data that meet certain criteria and hide the rest temporarily.

Next, Number formatting changes how numbers display without altering their actual value. Conditional Formatting highlights cells automatically based on rules or criteria, helping spot trends or outliers.

The dataset we were cleaning had a lot of duplicates, so it was important for us to remove the duplicates.

Text functions for Cleaning Data

Text functions are used to remove extra spaces , standardize text ,extract parts of strings or find and replace sub strings.

text functions include
UPPER() which convert text to uppercase
LOWER() which converts text to lowercase
PROPER() which capitalizes first letter of each word
TRIM () removes extra space from text
LEFT () extracts leftmost characters
RIGHT() extracts rightmost characters
MID() extracts characters from the middle
LEN() returns length of text
FIND() Finds position of a substring

Conclusion

Data cleaning with excel is fun and this only but week one, cant wait to learn more.

Understanding The Git Workflow :Working Directory, Staging, Commit and Push

rachel ngunjiri — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 09:02:55 +0000

Git is very interesting to learn as a first time data science and analytics student that has no prior background.

At first I thought well we are coding on the first day.

Luckily, we had a very patient teacher for this. We started by in installation of the software , then to installation of GitHub.

I remember as we GitHub we setup our email and we got SSH keys. Then we setup our identity, git config--global user.name, _git config --global user.email.

Password entry on Git Bash was I found very interesting.

When asked for it on the terminal it was invisible, I thought I wasn't typing anything at all.

I remember as code such as cd , ls ,cat,, git push and many more code.

What started as something that looked intimidating quickly became something I genuinely enjoyed learning.

So what is the Git workflow

The git workflow is the process of making changes to files, preparing those changes , saving them in Git, and sending them to remote repository such as GitHub

We start by setting up as working directory of GitBash. A working directory is where you work on you files.

On the directory our can create and make changes files and README.MD which is description of what you are working on.

After that you move all you changes to your current directory onto the staging area and proceed to commit.

I describe commit as a snapshot of all the changes i have chosen to record, basically it helps me remember all i changed the directory,

Finally you push it to remote repository such as GitHub.

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