Hi, everyone. Now that we've downloaded our data from Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, we have the opportunity to actually manipulate it to look good in our report. When you have a lot of data, you want to remember to keep it simple. Some of the information that you download might not actually be relevant to your goals, but that's okay. Sometimes they can tell a different story. Ultimately, when you're creating tables or any other sort of data visualization, you want to remember that folks who are reading this report may not be familiar to what the data points mean, or what the story is that they're telling.

If you see a table with too many data points, it can be fairly overwhelming. So consider ways to break up your table or put it in different sections or potentially display it as a chart or graph. Ultimately, the goal for you To tell the best story to your reader, you want to make sure that it's very clear by keeping it simple, but also organizing the data properly. Let's go through an example of manipulating data to look good in a table. This is a report I downloaded from Facebook after running a few ads. As you can see, it's pretty hard to read.

Some of my columns don't have any information, some of them are irrelevant. So to tell the best story, I need to figure out what data points are most useful. So things like the day the report started and the date ended aren't relevant to me, so I'm going to just delete them. I already know that all of these campaigns are completed. So this is another column that I don't need. And of course, with my budget, I know exactly how much money I was using.

So these don't matter to my report either. I want to keep my ad spend because this is important for showing ROI. But I don't really need to show when the campaign ends. You can continue to go through all of your data points to think about if these are relevant to you or your reader. The next part is considering how much space this document actually takes up. When someone sees this chart, it may be hard to read because there's too many data points and it has to go all the way across several columns.

What I first recommend is adjusting the width of each column looking much better already. also recommend wrapping the titles of each column. Just make them look a little cleaner, you can center them if you like. And you can also make them a little bit bigger. We also can remove some of this other information, like the fact that my cost per click is in US dollars. This is I mean my reader already knows.

If you have values that are in dollar amounts, you can easily select the column and click this dollar sign here. That will turn it into $1 amount instead of just a numeric value. We can also do that here. I decided to leave in cost per 1000 impressions in parentheses because my reader may not know what CPM stands for. This can still be a little bit overwhelming just because there's so many campaigns that are listed. If there's a campaign that outperformed for some surprising reason, we can highlight it.

So this, for example, had a seriously high number of people reached as well as a high number of impressions. So we can do is select this campaign, and then give it a soft highlight. This draws attention to the numbers for my reader. You can also highlight certain data points to emphasize meeting a goal for your campaign. For example, if I wanted to have all of my campaigns under 10 cents cost per click, I can actually highlight that. If I select all of my data points and cost per click, and then use conditional formatting, I can select a rule such as less than and choose that any cell at less than 10 cents per click, is highlighted in green.

Now my viewer can see exactly which campaigns met our goal compared to the ones that did not. While we have a nicer looking table, it's still a little big, especially if we're going to be putting this in a Word document. What I would recommend is splitting up your table into two. So we can cut our data in half. We'll choose this column here, and we can copy it. Then we can just paste it immediately under this information here.

Since we have a copy properly, we can delete this information. You'll want to bring this campaign column down. It just makes it easier for your viewer. Now this is a little bit easier to read. We can also adjust the columns so that the titles are not as broken up and confusing. Depending on the goals of your campaign, it may be held To include a summary row, all of these posts, for example, were part of one major campaign.

And I want to know the total reach total impressions and all of our budget that we use for this campaign. So what we can do is insert a row here. We'll use a formula to calculate the total reach, we'll hit Enter, and then we'll type some. Then we'll select our data points. and hit OK. Now we have our total reach. Instead of retyping.

This formula, we can actually drag this over and apply it to the rest of our data points. Because cost per click is an average, we won't want to use sum so we can remove it here. After you have your formulas, you'll want to copy it them and then paste them back in using PASTE SPECIAL. This is because Excel does not see these values as numbers yet it only sees them as answers to these formulas, when we click Paste Special will have the option to paste them as values. Even though it doesn't seem like anything's changed, you'll notice here and here that now there are numbers instead of just formulas. With our cost per click, we'll want to look at an average.

So what we can use as a formula called average. Again, we'll want to select our data points created as $1 value. And you'll see here that on average, we were at 25 cents. Again, we'll want to copy this and then paste it as a value We can do the same thing with our rows here. drag this over. But we do have a couple that are dollar values.

So we won't want to do averages there. We do have a couple that are dollar values, so we won't want to do summaries there. So we'll delete those values and we'll do an average. Then, of course, we want to make all of our values that are dollar values visible and Ultimately copy these and paste them as values. Now we can use this data in a lot of different ways. We can copy the charts and paste them into other word documents, or we can send this document along to other stakeholders.