It is a universal truth that textsmiths work with data formats. Yet formats are attempts to impose structure on messy reality, but no format can decide what the right structure is for you. So in this post, we are going to look at what data cleaning is.

Here is a trick that I developed when creating tables inside word-processors like Microsoft Word or Libreoffice Writer: as a blind person, you should create a table first in CSV format then turn it into a regular grid table.

In the previous post, we looked at the table. But as textsmiths, we need to look at something that is so basic, something that we work with everyday, namely the comma-separated value file.

If ever there is one object that one has to understand in data analysis even before data collection, it is a table. A table is an organizing object of data.

The previous post asked, “Do spreadsheets define data analysis?” This one asks the more fundamental question: “What is data analysis in the first place?”