Clients come to Wonder with a variety of research questions, where the output goes into spreadsheets. In order for them to be able to manipulate the information and for you to be able to create data visualizations, spreadsheets must be clean.

Requirements

• In any column or row where we are working with numbers like revenue, market share, employee count, etc., we must ONLY put the number and a hyperlink in the cell.
  • When we use the number formatting, it will automatically add $, %, etc. That is fine. We just want to stay away from adding additional information ourselves.
• We will not use multiple currencies in a column. We must convert them all to the same currency.
• We will not report currencies in multiple formats like millions and billions. We will need to pick one and remain consistent.
  • For example, if not all your currencies are in the billions, you will need to report each one in millions.
• We understand that there are times when we will need to comment or further explain to the client. In these cases, we will add a column directly to the right of the column we are working in for notes or other information.

Considerations for Clean Spreadsheets

• Get rid of extra spaces at the beginning of your text.
• Convert numbers stored as text into the number format.
• Be consistent with capitalization. For example, if all your cells start with a capital letter, we don’t want a few not to be capitalized.
• Always run the spell-check before you submit.
• Align all text to either the left or the right. Do not use the center alignment.
• Avoid empty cells within the data. If an option is not selected for you, you can either choose to put “0” or n/a in the cell, but be consistent throughout the whole spreadsheet.
• Do NOT merge cells.

Examples

Revenue

Notice in the first column, we have words and numbers. We are reporting in millions and billions, and we have shared additional context. In the second column, we only have revenue reports in millions and we only have the number in Column C. In Column D, we have added the extra information the client needs and have entered n/a in any cell where we did not need to share extra information.

Triangulated/Calculated Information