How To Email Yourself Tomorrow’s Schedule

Occasionally, when I’m not at work, I find myself wanting to know what tomorrow’s schedule looks like. Since my employer has disabled calendar syncing, I’m usually faced with two options:

1. Go to my home computer, remote into my work computer, and check my calendar
2. Decide it’s too much work and give up

Of course I could go with the first option. I know I could. You know I could. But we both know what option I go with – every time. So I’m left there on the couch, staring at my computer across the room, thinking “I can do this… but it’s all the way over there…”

It was that inherent laziness that drove me to spend hours working tirelessly on a way to see my agenda without ever leaving the couch. Now, all I have to do is send a specific email from my phone to my work computer, and it will email me back a nicely formatted list of all the meetings I have for that day. Problem solved!

How To Email Yourself Meeting Reminders

I can be absent minded sometimes.

It’s not uncommon for me to be sitting down to enjoy a PB&J, but realize that I want something to drink. As I get up for it, I remember I also need a knife, so I grab the knife and sit down. Then, 20 minutes later, after I’ve taken my last bite, I suddenly remember that I originally wanted a glass of water. (Does it take you 20 minutes to eat a PB&J? If you’re doing it right, it does.)

Save Time with Excel Chart Templates

You’ve just finished creating an awesome custom chart in Excel. It’s the perfect fit for summarizing what’s important in your data. The problem is that making it takes way too long. I mean, 30 minutes to develop a chart is one thing, but 15 minutes to reproduce it every time is unacceptable. You lead a busy life – those mines won’t sweep themselves!

How To Make a Boxplot in Excel

In this post we’ll cover how to create box plots in Excel. Along with scatter plots, box plots are a standard in statistical analysis – especially during the exploratory phase, when you’re just familiarizing yourself with the data. That’s because they’re great at showing the spread of values – what’s your maximum, minimum, and important in-between values.

LockBox Password Protector

I thought I’d take a little break this week by highlighting one of the personal projects I’ve recently finished.

Plotting a Course: Pie Charts

Oh the pie chart – where would we be without the salt & vinegar chips of the data world?

I remember one of the first major analyses I did in my career. It dealt with percentages, so naturally I went for the pie chart, because – you know – that’s what they’re for, right?

New Logo!

I am pleased to announce that my site has a new, slick logo, courtesy of Dan David! Dan is a graphics & UX designer with a knack for data. I, on the other hand, am a statistician with a knack for design. So the two of us together make a pretty good team!

Plotting a Course: Bar Charts

Last post we covered what works best with line charts. This post, we’ll be covering another standard chart: the bar chart.

Plotting a Course: Line Charts

Ever looked at a chart you just finished and thought “something’s not right”? Yeah, I’ve been there too. Even after years of shaolin-monk-like training in data analysis, I started out knowing practically nothing about data visualization. Since then, I’ve had to learn it on the street, like an animal.

Welcome to The Numberist

Do you feel like you’re in a slump? Do your loved ones say you’re not nerdy enough for them? Did your dog run away because you can’t even make your own waffle graph? If this is you, you’ve come to the right place. Welcome to The Numberist.

My goal for this blog is to make you awesome at all things data. This means that I’ll regularly cover topics like data analysis, visualization, & dashboarding. To mix things up a bit, I’ll occasionally post math interest topics, or projects I’m working on, with samples for you to freely use. But don’t think that I’m some sort of data veteran with nothing left to learn – I still have a long way to go. I encourage you to get involved, leave comments, ask questions, and give advice. With any luck, we’ll both learn a lot from each other.