Dealing with Data Sets

 Welcome back to my Tech blog!

This week I spent some time playing around with data sets on Google Sheets. In class, we discussed different ways that we can visualize and interpret data. My professor introduced a data set of the 1000 top rated IMDB movies. Since I am a big movie fanatic myself and love exploring new titles, I decided to stick with this data set. He downloaded this data set from a public data source called Kaggle. Here, we searched for and located our interests. We then downloaded the data from the public source onto our computers. I then imported that data into Google Sheets, the spreadsheet program of my choice. 

Now this is where the fun began. I was free to play around with my data as I pleased. I was able to organize my data my way; I deleted some meaningless data, reorganized columns, made sense of various fields, fixed missing data, sorted and filtered the data and so much more!

One cool tool I learned in class was how to use a pivot table to summarize and aggregate the data. I was able to pick and choose what I wanted to be represented in the rows, columns and values. I played around with that for some time and soon figured out how to make a graph or other charts to visualize the aspects and trends of the data. I liked this a lot as I believe I am a very big visual learner. The graphs I created helped me to see all of the data and put it into perspective. 

This is a screenshot image I took of one of the graphs I created. It is a pie chart displaying all of the different genres of the top 1000 IMDB movies. Until I constructed this graph, I did not realize how many different genre types could be represented. It is interesting because a lot of them are combinations of more than one genre. For example, crime and drama is represented separately than crime, drama, and mystery. One can conclude from the chart that the genre of Drama is definitely weighted the heaviest, coming up at 8.5%. It is the most used genre in the top 1000 IMDB movies. 

As one can probably tell, I had quite some fun playing around with this data set. And the best part is that I expanded my technological knowledge and skill set while doing so!