Beautiful data - MMM #4

Hi all,

It’s been a busy week with many group projects kicking off, creating the traditional two-weeks-of-chaos at the start of any academic term. I’m confident that’ll all get resolved soon so I should have more time for my side-projects again soon.

📃here’s what I think you’ll find interesting this week:

Have a great week!

Now, at the risk of repeating myself, another amazing piece of valuation content by Dr. Aswath Damodaran. But this time it’s not any content or data update, it’s open access to his excellent course in valuation that’s being taught this spring at NYU Stern (yes right now). If you have 2-3 hours to spare every week this comes highly recommended! The fact that this is freely available on YouTube goes to show how impactful the internet can be to make knowledge freely available globally.

I recently discovered the wonderful art of data visualization. It is an evolving landscape full of neat unconventional ways to display data.

It makes you think about how to present data in an intuitive way and how you can go beyond the basic bar chart to present your data in an appealing and engaging way. Some of these are truly stunning!

Fast typing is the modern day superpower. People typically speak at 100-130 words per minute (WPM) but the typical typing speed is far below that. Ever since I started practicing I improved my typing speed from 80 WPM to consistently around 110 WPM now. My favorite website to practice on is MonkeyType, which you can completely customize to your liking. Not only is it great to see the improvement a little bit of deliberate practice can make, you also immediately enjoy the benefits in your day-to-day activities.

Lastly, there is a neat upcoming Excel feature that you should be aware of.

If you have ever worked with dropdown lists (data validation lists) in Excel, you’ll know that they can get annoying pretty quickly as they grow longer. This upcoming feature, currently being rolled out for Office 365, allows you to search the drop down list. For example: typing John would filter the list to only show names that contain John so you can more easily find the right entry.

Thanks for reading and sticking with the newsletter, I’m still having some issues with messages being marked as spam so if that’s the case for you please take a couple of seconds to mark the message as ‘not spam’.

Feel free to share feedback, tips, or interesting things you read with me: mmm@tkon.nl.

Talk to you next week!