Resources
Here are some resources you may find helpful for converting and importing data for your projects. All tutorials are designed for Windows lab machines.
- Remember that you can import XML files directly into Excel using a Windows machine. The instructions for Windows in Task 2 from Activity 1-1 tells you how.
- General Instructions for running a JAR file.
- xml2csv-con.jar: Convert XML files to CSV files that you can import into Excel. Instructions can be found in Activity 1-1.
- xml2csv-con_fixed.jar: Sometimes the original JAR file lost the last row. This is a fixed version of the XML-to-CSV converter.
- GrabSenateVotes.jar: UPDATED! Gathers all the votes from a specified congress number and puts them into an XML file. Works for Congress sessions from 101-112. It will report votes that could not be added due to formatting issues.
- GrabHouseVotes.jar: New! Gathers all the votes from a specified year from the House and puts them into an XML file. There are many votes in each year (for example, there are about 600 votes for 2010).
- Get5StarRatings.jar: UPDATED! uses the updated URLs to retrieve 5-star ratings for vehicles. This program takes as input a CSV file with the columns "badurl,badid,make,model,year". Download the xml file here and convert it to a CSV file by either importing it into Excel and saving it or by using the converter above.
- Instructions for converting SPSS files to Excel.
Here are some resources you may find helpful for displaying and presenting your projects. All tutorials are designed for Windows lab machines.
- Tutorial for creating a Google website.
- Instructions to publish an Excel table as a webpage.
- Make sure you click the Share button in the upper right of your Google site so it can be viewed by anyone. If you want to keep it private, you can grant the course staff access.
- Sometimes hand-annotating interesting trends is better than describing them using text. Look at this website that visualizes the number of vehicles involved in fatal crashes using conditional formatting.
- Windows and Mac instructions for creating a ZIP file.