Data skills for media professionals : a basic guide / Ken Blake, Jason Reineke.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Basic data analysis -- Data visualization -- Making online maps -- Microsoft Excel and PivotTables -- Matching records with Excel's VLOOKUP -- Excel and inferential statistics -- Other functions, tools and techniques.

"Our students often tell us they don't like doing math. We tell them we don't, either. We've had the conversation often enough to know that students usually are referring to their dislike for the tedium and anxiety of completing such standard-issue math course tasks as solving 20 separate quadratic equations for 20 separate 'x' values, each with no meaning beyond indicating whether one can solve a quadratic equation. Neither of us ever liked doing that kind of thing, or ever will. But computers don't seem to mind it at all. Given valid data and correct instructions, they'll do it without complaint. They'll also do it with much more speed and accuracy than either of us could. So, we let computers do the math. We do the thinking. In this book we focus on getting computers to do the kinds of math behind the kinds of thinking that media professionals must do most often: thinking about what questions to ask, how to ask them, and how to evaluate and communicate the answers"-- Provided by publisher.