Thinkabara

📗 Excel & Google Sheets for Students · Lesson 2 of 7

Cleaning and formatting lab data

Google Classroom

Tables, number formats, rounding, sorting and filtering.

Tidy data

One rowOne observation (one trial, one participant)
One columnOne variable, with units in the header: “Temp (°C)”
One cellOne value — no “12 (approx.)”
No merged cellsThey break sorting and formulas

Make it a table

Excel: select the data and press Ctrl+T. Google Sheets: Format > Convert to table. Tables add filter buttons, banded rows and formulas that fill down automatically.

Numbers and rounding

Format > Number lets you set decimal places without changing the value. To actually round a calculated value, use =ROUND(A2, 2). Keep full precision in calculations and round only for display — report significant figures your lab requires.

Sort and filter

Data > Sort orders rows by a column; Data > Filter (or the table’s filter buttons) shows only rows that match, like Trial = 3 or Temp > 50. Freeze the header row (View > Freeze) so you always see column names.

Tip

💡 Never sort just one column — select the whole table, or rows get scrambled and your data stop matching.

✏️ Practice: your turn

  1. Enter a small lab dataset in tidy format with units in headers
  2. Convert it to a table
  3. Round a calculated column with ROUND
  4. Filter to one trial and sort by a measurement

✏️ Online spreadsheet: practice formulas without installing anything

🧠 Quick quiz

Answer all 4 questions correctly to mark this lesson as done.

1. In tidy data, each row is…
2. Why avoid merged cells?
3. =ROUND(A2, 2)…
4. Sorting a single column alone…

0 of 4 correct

All lessons in Excel & Google Sheets for Students

  1. 🎓 1. A grade tracker with weighted averagesSUMPRODUCT, absolute references and “what do I need on the final?”
  2. 🧪 2. Cleaning and formatting lab dataTables, number formats, rounding, sorting and filtering
  3. 🔀 3. IF, COUNTIF and AVERAGEIFLabel results and summarize by condition
  4. 🔍 4. XLOOKUP and VLOOKUPPull matching data from another table
  5. 🧮 5. Pivot tablesSummarize hundreds of rows in a few clicks
  6. 📊 6. Charts for reportsPick the right chart, label it and keep it clean
  7. 💵 7. Project: a student budgetIncome, expenses, categories, a pivot and a chart