Free datasets to practice Data Analysis
The first place where you can go and get some sample data sets to practice data analytical skills is kaggle just go to kaggle.com you will find many sample data sets that you can readily use for doing some data analysis projects so let's see how you can download a dataset with kaggle.com just sign in with your google account and once you are in the pro in the website just go to the data sets section and from here you can browse for data sets for example here is a trending data set on linkedin influencer data it is available in a csv format so we could go there these data sets are all usually collected by general public and uploaded to kaggle.com so you can browse the data set and if you find like oh this looks interesting i would like to do some analysis on this as a practice you can immediately download it once you download the data just open it in your favorite spreadsheet program such as microsoft excel or if the file is a text file or json or xml file then open it in relevant editors and then browse the data and connect this data to either power bi tableau or microsoft excel for your analysis situations the second place to get sample data sets for practicing your data analysis skills is workout wednesday just search for workout wednesday you will go to this web page the concept of this website is very simple every wednesday they'll post a data visualization challenge so this is more specific if you would like to improve your data visualization and storytelling skills you it used to be mainly a tableau basic challenge but nowadays they have diversified both into power bi and tableau so you have challenges available in both platforms the best part though is every week you get fresh data sets for you to work on and create some visualizations share it with the community and compare the notes so that you can also learn better again just a quick reminder i'm not affiliated with any of these people i feel like these are the places where free sample data sets are available and i often go there to kind of get some inspiration and ideas and i thought this would be a fun place to share about them so that you can also benefit from this so for example the latest one 2021 week 35 is on power bi and if you click on it you will read a little bit more about the challenge this one happens to be a data visualization on how to make coffee various types of coffees so you have your espresso flat white and uh mocha etc you know how to make them what is the composition of various types of drink in that as a graphic but you can also download the data set from from this page if you just scroll through you'll see that there is a data set section and just download that data into your excel or power bi and then use that for doing your analysis work the third place to get free sample data sets is open government data websites many countries have their own open data initiatives so for example us has their open government website new zealand has stats.
Government.nz website all of these places are where you can go and download free data sets that are published by the government about various programs and policies that they run i'll show you how i i normally use the stats website to get some sample data sets for my power bi exercises so this is the statistics new zealand website and as you could see they have lots of data here normally i would go to the tools and then look for some of these data sets so there is a section called the csv files for download i'd go there and then i can see if if there is anything that is interesting for me to do some analysis and then i'll just grab that for example business financial data march 20 21 quarter csv um let's just take a look at this so some sort of uh trend values and quarterly results for various types of businesses is here obviously you need a little bit more time to understand what is available there but this is a good data set for you to for example practice how do i take this and clean it up a little bit so that i can maybe just look at the data for the last six quarters using power query you know that's a very interesting task and you can do that with this sample data set i have given some links for official government open data websites for various geographies in the video description below feel free to check that out and go and get some data from there the fourth place to get sample data is to use your own favorite programs be it power bi or tableau usually they come packaged with some sample data sets so for example when you open power bi you could see that they got this try a sample data set button right there and if you click on it it will ask you some questions and then it will show you what you want so for example here it is offering me a tutorial if i don't want to do the tutorial i can just say load sample data and it will load up the data into my power bi workbook here it's i think by default using the financial sample data set which is very good it has quite a bit of variety and information there and i can just quickly load it up and do some analysis practice my skills on making various types of graphs or calculating measures the fifth place where you can go to get some sample data is the forums or the q and a places you could go to mrexcel forum or the stack overflow or even forum.
Chendu.org and normally this is how i would use them i would go there i will scan for the questions that are posted recently and then if a particular question looks interesting or challenging but not too complex then i will go and look at the question uh download the file and then i'll try it myself and if i find the answer obviously i will post it in the forum but a long way i now have access to some data and the real life challenge that is faced by someone else so that will give me some additional information and insight into what other things people are doing how they are struggling with these tools so it helps me you might think oh in this process i am only helping.
Them i'm not helping myself but the reality is when you go to these places and you download the files and you create some solutions you're also benefiting you're learning how to use the tools better you're getting some free sample data for you to practice so it's a win-win the sixth place to get sample data sets to practice is to look at your own personal life maybe you have a smart watch maybe you have a credit card or a bank account and just download that data and use that to analyze maybe you are investing and you got some stock market data access to you so use all of that and do that as part of data analysis work for example i regularly download my credit card statements to excel or power bi and do some analysis on them for two reasons number one obviously to understand where my money is going but number two also to understand some of the more interesting ways in which these tools have evolved so for example earlier if i have to download my credit card data i would have to copy paste it into excel or text file before i could load it into excel but now they have a pdf connection option so i want to test that out so again i try my credit card statement connect it to a pdf uh into excel and then i just analyze that so this is a great way for you to kind of knock out two birds with one stone and then the last but not the least way is to use the random data generation techniques you could of course use excel's own random functions you know if you want to make up for example a random number between 1 to 100 you could use the rand between function simply say 1 comma 100 and you'll get a random number but what if you need to make like 1000 rows of data you could use this new function that is introduced in excel 365 called rand array and you can specify how big of data you want so let's say i want thousand rows five columns so we'll put 1005 the minimum needs to be 10 maximum needs to be 300 and they all needs to be integers and when you say it like that you.
Will get the data nicely returned to you in a big range all random numbers and you could then use this to maybe do some simulations or make some graphs or do some analysis or whatever you can use this rant between rand array functions and extend them to generate random text random anything really but if you are a little too lazy and you don't want to bother excel to generate this data you could go to websites like mockaroo and this is a random data generator website and i use this often to generate some names or email addresses or anything else for that matter and you just fill up the forms and just click ok and it will give you a csv file with 1000 rows but you can also tell how many rows you want and it will work so there you go these are the seven places where i would normally go if i want to get some data sets to practice my data analysis skills all the best and if you would like to learn a little more about data analysis do check out my video on beginner to pro data analysis with excel course it is linked on the screen thank you bye.
Government.nz website all of these places are where you can go and download free data sets that are published by the government about various programs and policies that they run i'll show you how i i normally use the stats website to get some sample data sets for my power bi exercises so this is the statistics new zealand website and as you could see they have lots of data here normally i would go to the tools and then look for some of these data sets so there is a section called the csv files for download i'd go there and then i can see if if there is anything that is interesting for me to do some analysis and then i'll just grab that for example business financial data march 20 21 quarter csv um let's just take a look at this so some sort of uh trend values and quarterly results for various types of businesses is here obviously you need a little bit more time to understand what is available there but this is a good data set for you to for example practice how do i take this and clean it up a little bit so that i can maybe just look at the data for the last six quarters using power query you know that's a very interesting task and you can do that with this sample data set i have given some links for official government open data websites for various geographies in the video description below feel free to check that out and go and get some data from there the fourth place to get sample data is to use your own favorite programs be it power bi or tableau usually they come packaged with some sample data sets so for example when you open power bi you could see that they got this try a sample data set button right there and if you click on it it will ask you some questions and then it will show you what you want so for example here it is offering me a tutorial if i don't want to do the tutorial i can just say load sample data and it will load up the data into my power bi workbook here it's i think by default using the financial sample data set which is very good it has quite a bit of variety and information there and i can just quickly load it up and do some analysis practice my skills on making various types of graphs or calculating measures the fifth place where you can go to get some sample data is the forums or the q and a places you could go to mrexcel forum or the stack overflow or even forum.
Chendu.org and normally this is how i would use them i would go there i will scan for the questions that are posted recently and then if a particular question looks interesting or challenging but not too complex then i will go and look at the question uh download the file and then i'll try it myself and if i find the answer obviously i will post it in the forum but a long way i now have access to some data and the real life challenge that is faced by someone else so that will give me some additional information and insight into what other things people are doing how they are struggling with these tools so it helps me you might think oh in this process i am only helping.
Them i'm not helping myself but the reality is when you go to these places and you download the files and you create some solutions you're also benefiting you're learning how to use the tools better you're getting some free sample data for you to practice so it's a win-win the sixth place to get sample data sets to practice is to look at your own personal life maybe you have a smart watch maybe you have a credit card or a bank account and just download that data and use that to analyze maybe you are investing and you got some stock market data access to you so use all of that and do that as part of data analysis work for example i regularly download my credit card statements to excel or power bi and do some analysis on them for two reasons number one obviously to understand where my money is going but number two also to understand some of the more interesting ways in which these tools have evolved so for example earlier if i have to download my credit card data i would have to copy paste it into excel or text file before i could load it into excel but now they have a pdf connection option so i want to test that out so again i try my credit card statement connect it to a pdf uh into excel and then i just analyze that so this is a great way for you to kind of knock out two birds with one stone and then the last but not the least way is to use the random data generation techniques you could of course use excel's own random functions you know if you want to make up for example a random number between 1 to 100 you could use the rand between function simply say 1 comma 100 and you'll get a random number but what if you need to make like 1000 rows of data you could use this new function that is introduced in excel 365 called rand array and you can specify how big of data you want so let's say i want thousand rows five columns so we'll put 1005 the minimum needs to be 10 maximum needs to be 300 and they all needs to be integers and when you say it like that you.
Will get the data nicely returned to you in a big range all random numbers and you could then use this to maybe do some simulations or make some graphs or do some analysis or whatever you can use this rant between rand array functions and extend them to generate random text random anything really but if you are a little too lazy and you don't want to bother excel to generate this data you could go to websites like mockaroo and this is a random data generator website and i use this often to generate some names or email addresses or anything else for that matter and you just fill up the forms and just click ok and it will give you a csv file with 1000 rows but you can also tell how many rows you want and it will work so there you go these are the seven places where i would normally go if i want to get some data sets to practice my data analysis skills all the best and if you would like to learn a little more about data analysis do check out my video on beginner to pro data analysis with excel course it is linked on the screen thank you bye.