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Sentiment Analysis in MS Excel

Utilizing Microsoft Azure ML add-in to perform Sentiment Analysis within an Excel worksheet.

Modern day business tasks require us to consume ever-increasing volume of data, which often comes in an unstructured form. Whether you’re looking to get to know your customer preferences better via a survey or seek to understand their opinions on the products you sell by scraping online product reviews, chances are you will need to find a way to efficiently analyze large stacks of text. You would be best served to take advantage of a sentiment analysis tool to undertake such a labor-intensive task. Last week I had a great opportunity to share my take on understanding the basics of Sentiment Analysis with the Strategic Finance Magazine. While I briefly covered fundamentals of textual preprocessing (tokenization, POS tagging, stop word removal, stemming, etc.) as well as various ways to perform actual analysis in this journal, those who are interested in an unabridged version of this article might want to head to my LinkedIn post on this subject for a more detailed overview.

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Microsoft Excel personal macro workbook.


Personal Macro Excel Workbook

          We have already explored different Excel VBA macros here, here, and here, . While the power of Excel VBA is limited only by our creative imagination, the real limitation of a typical VBA code comes from the fact that it resides in the workbook where it was saved, and as such, can only be revoked while this file is open. This is where the personal macro workbook comes into play: if we save our code in this centralized place, we could use it in any Excel workbook on our local drive. This productivity hack would help us perform repetitive tasks (formatting and data presentation pet peeves, anyone) by automating them. The easiest way to save your code into PERSONAL.XLSB workbook is through recording a macro.

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Microsoft Excel’s CONVERT Function.


CONVERT Excel Function

          Microsoft Excel is one of those great software applications that empowers us to do a lot of different things. You can create art masterpieces , convert digital photos into pixel worksheets , create a cool animation , build a flight simulator , or play a game of Tetris . If you don’t feel ambitious enough to write pages upon pages of VBA code, but still want to do something practical with the program, perhaps you want to learn how to perform different conversion calculations in Excel? In fact, CONVERSION function enables you to convert weight, distance, time, pressure, force, energy, power magnetism, temperature, volume, liquid measure, area, information, and speed measures from one unit to another. The later version of Microsoft Excel you are running the more conversions you can perform. If you are working in Excel 2003 or earlier, this function is not available on earlier versions of Microsoft Excel.

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17 Excel Functions to use in 2017.


17 Excel Functions for 2017

          Versatility of Excel’s built-in functions is undeniably one of the main reasons behind this program’s popularity. As users, we have the flexibility to compose complex formulas incorporating multiple functions in our solution to achieve substantial gains in productivity. Most people have their own go-to Excel functions, be it: financial, date & time, math & trigonometry, statistics, look up & reference, database, text (manipulation), or logical. We’ve covered some of these functions already, but below is a compilation of 17 relatively under-used Excel functions you might want to add to your professional repertoire in the new year. Fair warning, you might need to have Office 365 version of Excel for all of the functions to work.

          1. PMT
          2. DATEDIF
          3. LARGE
          4. REPT
          5. LEN
          6. TRIM
          7. SUBSTITUTE
          8. TEXT
          9. IFS
          10. CONVERT
          11. NETWORKDAYS
          12. HLOOKUP
          13. INDIRECT
          14. OFFSET
          15. TRANSPOSE
          16. DSUM
          17. RAND
          BONUS: SUMPRODUCT

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