Using Spreadsheets for Research Data Management

The RDS group advocates for good data management practices at UW-Madison. Data management is a topic that is attracting more and more attention in the era of Big Data. One ubiquitous practice among researchers and analysts in academia and business is the use of spreadsheets for data entry, storage, and analysis. While the use of spreadsheets in research is widespread, there are few guidelines for such use. Indeed, spreadsheets pose some troublesome issues from the perspective of documenting and managing research data. The topic of spreadsheet use in research has gained quite a bit of traction since Spring, 2013, when a controversial and widely-cited academic paper on government debt and growth was shown to be based on a faulty Excel dataset.

Prompted in part of this and other related events, RDS has recently updated its recommendations on using spreadsheets in research data management.  Another great resource to consult before deciding to use spreadsheets for your research is a primer on using Excel for data entry assembled by the UW Social Science Computing Cooperative. Some tools that can potentially improve the documentation of spreadsheet data and analysis are Colectica for Excel and Data Up.