By Hilary Niles
@nilesmedia

Excel has two free, plug-ins for Windows users that can dramatically help reporters: NodeXL and PowerPivot. (Sorry Mac devotees, nothing for us.)

Tom Torok, CAR editor of The New York Times, and Peter Aldhous, New Scientist’s San Francisco Bureau Chief demoed the two plugins at the 2012 CAR Conference.

NodeXL is a network analysis tool compatible with Windows 2007 and 2010 that allows you to visualize, quantify and otherwise describe connections between people, organizations, or really anything. Because of its broad applicability, Aldhous chose to not refer to it as “social network analysis,” but you ...

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When the California legislature passed a law to drastically increase funding to nursing homes, it came with a promise that worker wages would rise, staffing would soar and patient care would improve.

The law passed in 2004. When I started working on investigative articles for California Watch in the fall of 2009, it seemed like a good idea to take a close look at whether the promises attached to hundreds of millions of dollars came true.

What we found was noteworthy. State and federal funders poured an additional $880 million into nursing homes over five years, moving the annual funding ...

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We've received lots of questions about whether the optional Computer-Assisted Reporting day at the Baltimore conference June 11-14 is suitable for people new to CAR. The answer is "Yes." The day will serve as a good introduction to the tools and tricks of analyzing electronic information. In addition, hands-on classes Friday through Saturday will give you actual experience using spreadsheets and databases. Here are some Thursday panels I think would be suitable for those new to CAR as well as seasoned veterans:

Thursday (6/11/09)	Panel(s)
9:00 - 10:00 a.m.	CAR's greatest hits: 2008-2009 ...

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Excel has more tools and functions than you might imagine at first glance. However, there’s one that I turn to again and again: the IF function. The versatility of this thing is impressive, and it seems to fit well with a lot of the tasks we need to do to manipulate and rearrange data we get from others. The statement that "data are always dirty" is so true, but we should add that data are almost always set up in a way that isn’t ready for the analysis we need to do. Some examples: --Election data will often ... Read more ...

“That’s not on computer.” We’ve all heard that from officials reluctant to release data. But sometimes it really isn’t on computer, and in such cases, creating a database can be torture. Stealing techniques from social scientists may save you some work. Pulling a random sample of records for your database will allow you to calculate trends in the larger data set. When The Dallas Morning News analyzed jury selection, reporters pulled a sample of trials for which they obtained juror cards. Steve Doig, the Knight Chair in Journalism at Arizona State University, might chime in here and ... Read more ...

We already suspected a disproportionate number of Western New York’s lottery players live in Buffalo's poor neighborhoods. The lure of a $1 and a dream is strong where poverty rates run high. But our simple question had not been answered: Are they as likely to win as players from wealthier areas? Our mapping analysis found that, not only are the poor more likely to buy lottery tickets, they are more likely to lose as well. That's not because poor people are any more or less lucky at the lottery than wealthier people.

Instead, as we documented in ...

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Microsoft gave Excel, its spreadsheet program, an extreme interface makeover as part of the overhaul of its Office 2007 software suite. Excel users accustomed to the menus and wizards of old will no doubt find the Ribbon\Tab\Button interface daunting at first. But, after spending time with the program, most journalists doing CAR will find that the interface provides a quicker way to find key functions. Here are some things you need to know about Excel 2007 to get up and running. 1. Office Open XML (.xlsx) is the default file format in Excel 2007. If you create any ... Read more ...

The 2008 Republican National Convention, which was held four blocks from our office in downtown St. Paul, was the biggest event this newspaper has covered in a good number of years. We knew that organization would be a key to making sure everything went smoothly. We ended up harnessing some CAR power to make that a bit easier. To be sure, there are probably dozens of other things we could have done if given the time and resources. Not having covered an event like this before, most of those involved weren’t quite sure what to expect or what we ... Read more ...

Every day, on average, a city vehicle or two hits something in this corner of Virginia. Sometimes it’s a mailbox. Sometimes it's another car. Sometimes it's a person. Often the offending vehicle is a school bus. But sometimes it’s a garbage truck, or a police car, or a fire truck. Those accidents cost localities millions of dollars a year, and sometimes they injure or kill people. Throughout the 1990s, I covered civil courts in the Norfolk-Virginia Beach area, a region with about 1.6 million people. Often I would find lawsuits against cities and schools. Usually ... Read more ...