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Frank Bennack: "Leave Something On The Table"

Over the years I’ve written a number of posts with a common theme revolving around various Analytics-related subjects. This article will be a great departure from my precedent, in that it would focus on the subject of Leadership, but also is based on a book. In fact, this is simply a collection of my notes after reading my first book so far this year: “Leave Something On the Table” by former Hearst Media CEO, Frank Bennack. In this book Mr. Bennack shares his advice on building success in one’s career and in personal life. Frank Bennack knows what he’s talking about: during his two stints as company’s CEO from 1979 to 2002 and 2008 to 2013, company’s revenue grew 14 times, while earnings rose 30 times. This growth is attributed to business expansion from a primarily newspaper publishing enterprise to a diversified media portfolio of magazines (Cosmopolitan, Esquire, O the Oprah Magazine, Car and Driver, etc), cable TV networks (50% stake in A&E; 20% stake in ESPN), 30+ local TV stations, financial services leader Fitch Group, a group of data, information, services and SAAS providers, and digital advertising companies. Still not convinced? Endorsements from other successful business people, including Michael Bloomberg, Ralph Lauren, and Robert Iger could help establish Mr. Benack’s credibility.

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A beginner’s Guide to BigQuery Sandbox and exploring public datasets.

A beginner's guide to BigQuery Sandbox

          As you might realize by now, writing SQL queries is one of the essential skills any inspiring data analyst needs to master. After all, larger datasets are typically stored in relational databases and Structured Query Language is the language that helps us communicate with such databases. Sure, NoSQL is gaining prominence amid the growing popularity of nontraditional databases, but we need to learn to crawl before we start walking. Merely 10 years ago, you would need to download and install a RDBMS software package (be it MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQLite), load a sample database and do a hundred pushups before you could write your very first SQL query. Luckily technology sprung ahead and we now have a plethora of web-based SQL editor options from SQL Lite Online to SQL Fiddle that eliminate the software setup step, but might still require us to load sample data. What if you wanted to access real-world big data sets from the comfort of your browser without having to download any software, no hassle, no trial, no credit card required? Well, you’re in luck, what follows is the beginner’s guide to Google BigQuery’s Sandbox. An active Google account is your cost of admission. BONUS: Machine Learning models are powered by nothing else but SQL are also included.
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String Manipulation using Microsoft Excel Text Functions
String Manipulation using Microsoft Excel Text Functions

     Last month I had an interesting Twitter exchange with Microsoft Excel’s Social Media team. @MSExcel asked it’s followers to share an Excel function or formula that they felt most proud of mastering. Many responses included rather complex formulas involving a clever combination of different functions. Yet, my example simply listed Excel’s MID function. When asked why I used such a basic example I reiterated a personal belief that Excel’s text manipulation functions are greatly underused and consequently underrated. Surely, VLOOKUP function is probably the most in-demand Excel function, soon to be replaced with a much anticipated upgrade: XLOOKUP ; yet many Excel users simply overlook or don’t realize the power and usefulness of Excel’s text manipulation functions. Whether you need to combine multiple strings together, or reformat your case-sensitive text, or perhaps parse out text without using Text to Columns tool , or even remove unwanted text, or find precise position of a specific letter or word, or replace old values with the new ones, or calculate number of characters in your string; all of these tasks can easily be accomplished with the help of mighty Excel text functions. An icing on the cake is the fact that these functions are very easy to use as long as you’re aware of their existence. In this post we will cover following text functions: UPPER, LOWER, PROPER, LEN, LEFT, RIGHT, CONCATENATE and already mentioned MID Excel functions.
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Learning to use data visualization programs


Gartner Magic Quadrant for data visualization programs

          Imagine spending countless hours analyzing your data and finding a meaningful insight that can help shape direction of your business – the only missing piece is convincing functional stakeholders that your analysis is in fact valuable. In this article we will discuss learning resources offered by leading tools that help us communicate our data findings. In fact, no analysis no matter how thorough and complex it might be could yield any real value if the compelling recommendation is not provided to help company leadership take further action. This is exactly where data visualization comes into play: this software allows us to connect to disparate data sources, wrangle our data, perform ad-hoc analyses, distill a powerful data story and even build dashboards to enable further analysis by other folks in our organizations.

          According to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms (1) the list of leaders in the data visualization fields include Microsoft Power BI, Tableau and Qlik . In an apparent effort to grow their user base and democratize data analytics, all of these providers offer fully functional versions of their programs free of charge or in case of Microsoft with an affordable subscription plan. Even better, these vendors formalized their knowledge base via various free online learning options.
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