To refer to a previous week's links: Week 8 | Week 9

This week we're looking at Google Fusion Tables as a tool for working with maps and data.

> Maps and Google Fusion Tables (PDF)

> Assignment details

Links for Excel

Don't worry that the screenshots in these help files (below) are from Windows. The Excel formuals are all the same in Excel for Mac. The menus and such are a little different, but you will be able to figure it out.

• Merging and splitting cells or data (how to, illustrated): Sometimes you have messy data, and you have to either merge cells together (CONCATENATE) or split them into multiple cells.
• Trimming the contents of a cell: Sometimes a cell has a lot of empty spaces after or within the text, and you need to strip those out, with TRIM.
• Change case: Some spreadsheets come with all uppercase letters. Ugh. (Another way to handle this is one column at a time in a good text editor, such as TextWrangler, where you can do all kinds of search-and-replace really fast, and then paste the revised column back into Excel. Work with whole columns, one at a time -- it's fast.)
• Paste Special: This one is a little long; the main thing to remember is you need to paste the VALUES, not the formula, before you can save a CSV to use in Fusion Tables.
• Example: You can download my spreadsheet for Alachua County schools (zipped Excel file), where you can see all my cleaning and trimming efforts on various worksheets in one file. After all was clean, I saved a CSV and uploaded that to Fusion Tables.

Links to Florida Department of Education

These are part of your Data 2 assignment.

• Florida Department of Education: Master School ID (all schools, addresses, etc., in the state)
• School mailing addresses: Go to the link above, click the Download Files button at bottom of page (download the "Mailing Addresses - Active schools only" Excel file here)
• Use the Florida COUNTIES BLOCK assigned to you. Get ALL the schools in those counties from the mailing addresses spreadsheet, and map them. (Make sure you have carefully selected all schools in all of your counties.)
• Page for all SAT scores, all high schools, Florida

Link to course syllabus

• Next week's assignment (Data 2) is posted on the course blog