{"id":454,"date":"2014-08-05T09:31:14","date_gmt":"2014-08-05T14:31:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dataabinitio.com\/?p=454"},"modified":"2014-07-31T19:15:19","modified_gmt":"2014-08-01T00:15:19","slug":"data-dictionaries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dataabinitio.com\/?p=454","title":{"rendered":"Data Dictionaries"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently, I was reading through Christie Bahlai\u2019s excellent roundup of spreadsheet best practices<\/a>\u00a0when I started thinking about documenting spreadsheets. You see, best practices say that spreadsheets should contain only one large data table with short variable names at the top of each column, which doesn\u2019t leave room to describe the formatting and meaning of the spreadsheet\u2019s contents. This information is important, especially if you are trying to use #otherpeoplesdata<\/a>, but it honestly doesn\u2019t belong in the spreadsheet.<\/p>\n

So how do you give context to a spreadsheet\u2019s contents? The answer is a data dictionary. And seeing as I haven\u2019t found a good post on data dictionaries and data dictionaries are right up there with README.txt<\/a>\u2019s\u00a0as a Documentation Structure of AwesomenessTM<\/sup>, I obviously need to give them a whole post on this blog.<\/p>\n

So what is a data dictionary? A data dictionary is something that describes the data in a dataset. Generally, a data dictionary includes an overall description of the data along with more detailed descriptions of each variable, such as:<\/p>\n