This is a short piece on a project I’m developing at NHS England, using Python to analyse patients’ inpatient care and determining where a Clinical Commission Group’s (CCG) patients are being treated significantly differently to those patients in its peer group CCGs (similar 10 CCGs as determined by NHS Rightcare Methodologies).
Quick Steps to Make Effective Data Visualisations
This is an example of the default settings for a bar chart in Excel. This is functional but could be far more effective; here are my main steps I use to create quick, effective data visualisations.
HOW TO… Excel: Create a hierarchical series of drop down boxes
As a result of prodding around the excel subreddit I found a query from user innocuous_gorilla about creating drop downs that are dependent upon each other. Due to working at NHS England where we have a massive array of organisation types and hierarchies, I quickly learnt how to do this! For example, in NHS England we have different regions, sub-regions and commissioning groups which tend to be massive long lists if un-filtered, so it makes it hard to select one in a drop down where all options available. Using the following method, you can make a set of drop downs that all depend on a master drop down(s), so choosing a region or sub-region filters the commissioning group drop down box to only those groups that belong to the chosen parent region.
HOW TO… VBA: Compare VBA Combo Box Values with Their Lists
Preamble
So, a recent issue I’ve had using VBA to create UserForms to handle data input is data validation. Throughout my UserForm I’ve included a variety of Combo Boxes that contain lists of information the user can select. In most instances I would like the user to have inputted exactly one of the options within the drop down provided with the combo box; VBA has its own property to handle whether Combo Boxes require an exact match – the MatchRequired property. While this can be used, it creates an issue where if a user leaves a combo box unfilled the combo box will say there is a no match and therefore an error – locking the user out of the form until they input something that is a match. My UserForm is used for modifying and inputting requests our team has had, therefore certain Combo Boxes won’t be able to be filled until a request itself has been completed, with fields such as ‘Quality Assured By:’ only being relevant when the work done has been QA’d. In this instance this Match Required error would cause the user to be forced to enter incorrect data to proceed with the form if they’d accidently clicked into this combo box.
To get around this I turned off the MatchRequired property and created my own data validation Subroutine to check if the value held by each combo box matches a value within the combo box’s list. To do this we will need to create an array of arrays and then iterate through those arrays, something that’s fairly straight forward in more robust languages like Python and C# but a bit more finicky in VBA. Below is some example code which we’ll go through step by step.
Starting Back at Work
At the start of the month, I started back with my old team at NHS England working as (you may have already guessed it isn’t clinically based) a data analyst.
Analytics and Ethics
Upon the enlightening release of the Cambridge Analytica exposé that revealed the company’s underhanded tactics it utilises to influence and manipulate people with a combination of data analytics, espionage, and ‘honeypotting’, I think it’s incredibly important to discuss how the analytical community needs to ensure a commitment to honest and unbiased analytics, and ethically sourced data.
HOW TO… Excel: Create a Dynamic Data Range for a Chart
Continuing the theme of automatically updating charts, we’re going to look at how to make a chart deal with a dynamically changing data range. This is useful for situations where you have multiple measures that each have a different number of independent variables (the variables plotted on our x-axis, which was the month of the year in our last example). If you use the method as lined out in the last tutorial for this you will find that the chart updates automatically, but the number of variables shown on the x-axis will not change. To solve this, we will need to use Named Ranges; OFFSET; and COUNT to produce the ranges that will feed the automatically updating charts.
HOW TO… Excel: Create an Automatically Updating Chart
Following on from our last series of HOW TO… Excel, we’re going to expand the concepts used to create the dynamic data table and create another sheet for the same workbook that will be the home of an automatically updating chart! Unlike pivot charts, this will be able to update as soon as new data is inputted into the data backsheets, and will be connected to the same ‘linked cell’ as our previous combo box, so the changes will be persistent throughout the workbook. This will allow us to create a consistent and pleasing user experience for whom ever will be using the tool.
Florida Ticket Price Comparisons
I’m going on holiday soon! I’m headed to Florida with my parents and being the cost savvy Brits that we are we’re always on the hunt for a bargain. We wanted to go do some of the Theme Parks (we settled on Disney and/or Universal Studios) and went about finding the cheapest ticket rates we could. During the internet hunt my Mum kept using the Calculator on her PC to do things like exchange rate conversions and to calculate price differences – but, being the Excel monkey that I am I proposed a much better solution: let’s whack it all in Excel and let me make some pretty charts!
Nintendo Console Dashboard – Linked Pictures
I was taking a glance around the Excel tag in the WordPress Reader, when I came across the following blog post about Linked Pictures in Excel.
This was a little bit of a revolution to me; when I made the Nintendo console dashboard I struggled to work out a passable fix for including dynamic pictures in VBA, ultimately deciding to scrap the code and just go with no pictures. Now that I know how to use Linked Pictures with named ranges to allow dynamic updates I could easily go back and update the old Dashboard!
