Overview of spreadsheets

Spreadsheets are a form of tabular data where information is stored in rows and columns, much like a two-dimensional array. They typically contain numeric and textual information and use formulas to summarize and analyze their contents. Most people are familiar with Excel spreadsheets, but they are also found as part of other product suites, such as OpenOffice.

Spreadsheets are an important data source because they have been used for the past several decades to store information in many industries and applications. Their tabular nature makes them easy to process and analyze. It is important to know how to extract data from this ubiquitous data source so that we can take advantage of the wealth of information that is stored in them.

For some of our examples, we will use a simple Excel spreadsheet that consists of a series of rows containing an ID, along with minimum, maximum, and average values. These numbers are not intended to represent any specific type of data. The spreadsheet looks like this:

In Chapter 3, Data Cleaning, we will learn how to extract data from spreadsheets.