Explore your data: Indexes and ratios

- [Instructor] So I've talked about how…sometimes exploring your data is best done just…by starting to generate charts, really just starting…to look at the data, and sometimes a visual representation…of the numbers is the best way, often times,…the best way for you to see what's interesting to see.…For instance, so here we have our minimum wage data.…There's no way I could have scanned across this row…of numbers and seen what I see here, that it goes up…and stays and goes up and stays and goes up and stays.…Maybe I could have seen that because these numbers…are literally the same, but I certainly couldn't have…told you what the pattern is in gas, that is sort of…goes up and down and up and down and up and down…and then shoots up and shoots down, et cetera.…

So visualization is a very powerful tool to explore…your data, which is why I start generating charts.…So first I generated charts of just the actual…numbers themselves, then I looked at the ratio,…how much gas could minimum wage buy me over each year,…