Welcome to pumpkin spiced October, reporters! Apologies for the missing TFR last month. I was wrapping things up at the SPJ conference, where I was telling people about something I call a “tech hack”: the Google Sheets Explore feature.
Explore is useful because you can use some data – like a spreadsheet – without really needing to know what to do with it. The program will walk you through interesting findings on its own. That’s why I refer to it as a ‘hack’ – a shortcut.
The newest version of Explore uses something called natural language processing, which has the distinction of sounding overcomplicated and blatantly clear at the same time. Natural language is what it sounds like: “how many apples are red?” rather than “count(apples) where color=red”.
That’s how Explore works, with the new update. It’s fantastic if you want to do some analysis without really doing analysis, but it has some major drawbacks. The NLP isn’t quite as natural as I’d like. For instance, “How many taxi drivers have medallions?” didn’t work with this data set, but “How many license types are medallions?” did. You have to land somewhere between human and computer speak if you want it to work right.
Sharon Machlis did a great writeup of the limitations of this update. Even with some limits, though, I would recommend it for data newbies. Go forth and explore!