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Workshop preparation

This workshop assumes you have a basic knowledge of spreadsheets and some basic math/stats knowledge. Preparing for this workshop consists of two steps: Getting the software and Getting the data. Follow the steps below.

Get the software

The following software is required or recommended for this tutorial:

  • [required] Spreadsheet software. This tutorial will use the web browser-based Google Sheets, though you should be able to achieve similar results with desktop programs like Microsoft Excel or LibreOffice Calc.
  • [required] Tableau Public–a free version of the Tableau data visualization and analysis software.
  • [optional] A text editor to convert the character encoding in the data file. Notepad++ is recommended for Windows, while SublimeText or TextMate is recommended for Macs.

Please contact the Sherman Centre if you have any difficulties downloading or opening the software.

Get the data

For this workshop, we’ll be working with Google mobility data made available through the Google COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports website.

Follow along with the video or the instructions listed below.

Before downloading data, take some time to explore the website. Read the documentation. Understand a bit what’s in the data, what to expect, how it was collected.

You can download the dataset for this workshop by clicking on the Region CSVs link. It will download a zip file with detailed data for every country tracked by Google. For this workshop, we’re interested only in the Canadian dataset (2020_CA_Region_Mobility_Report.csv). Once the file is downloaded, unzip the whole folder, or drag out the Canadian file into another folder to extract the single file.

A note about encoding

When you open the CSV in a spreadsheet, you may see off-looking characters in some of the columns as shown below:
La C��te-de-Gasp�� Regional County Municipality

That’s a character encoding issue. Spreadsheets assume an imported file has a certain character encoding, usually UTF-8. The Google data comes as UTF-8 with BOM, so this needs to be specified when you import the CSV. Follow the instructions below to import the data properly into Google Sheets and Excel:

In Google Sheets

Google Sheets doesn’t let you specify the encoding, so you have to re-encode the CSV in a text editor, save it, and re-import. Instead, you need to use a text editor (like Notepad++) to open the CSV file, change the encoding, and resave. To do this in Notepad++:

  • Open the csv file in Notepad++
  • Under the Encoding tab, choose UTF-8 BOM. Save the file. Window showing encoding change in Notepad++

  • Import the converted file in Google Sheets by opening a new Google Sheet and selecting File>Import and uploading it.

In Excel

In Excel, you can specify the character encoding at the time of import using the Text/CSV import function.

  • Open a blank Excel workbook
  • In the Data tab, select to import From Text/CSV
  • When the import wizard appears, change the value of File Origin to 650001: Unicode (UTF-8)
  • Click Load to import it into the spreadsheet Excel data import tool window

If you run into trouble

If you are unable to open the csv with proper encoding, use one of the links below to get a properly encoded version:

Once you have the file open as a spreadsheet, proceed to Part 1 of the workshop to begin exploring the data.