Okay, so today I wanted to mess around with some NFL quarterback stats. I had a bunch of data from different sources, and I needed to combine it all into one nice, clean place. It wasn’t super complicated, but it took a little bit of figuring out, so I figured I’d share my process.
Getting Started
First things first, I had to get my hands on the data. I had a couple of CSV files lying around from some other projects, and I also found some stats on some websites, so I copied and pasted those into a new spreadsheet. It was kind of a mess at this point – different column names, some missing data, that sort of thing.
Cleaning House
Next up, I had to clean up this mess. I started by making sure all the spreadsheets had the same column names. Things like “Passing Yards” were sometimes called “Yards” or “PYards”, so I just picked one (“Passing Yards”) and made everything consistent. This took a little bit of manual work, going through each spreadsheet and changing the names.
- Standardize Column Names: Made sure every spreadsheet used the same names for the same stats.
- Handle Missing Data: Some of the data was incomplete. I chose one to fill it.
Putting It All Together
With everything cleaned up, I could finally combine the data. Since I was already working in spreadsheets, I did it * I was working with much bigger data files, I would used something like Python with pandas, but for this, simple spreadsheet are good enough.
I opened a new, blank spreadsheet and started copying and pasting the data from the cleaned-up spreadsheets into it. I made sure to keep the order of the columns the same across everything, and I paid close attention to make sure I wasn’t accidentally duplicating any rows.
The Final Result
And that’s pretty much it! After a little bit of copying, pasting, and double-checking, I had a single spreadsheet with all the quarterback stats combined. It wasn’t rocket science, but it was a good little exercise in data wrangling. Now I can easily compare and analyze the stats without having to jump between different files and websites.
I can play around with the combined data and make some charts or whatever. It’s always satisfying to take a bunch of messy data and turn it into something useful!
