New York City’s Department of Buildings (DOB)

Overview of the Organization 

The organization is New York City’s Department of Buildings (DOB). It is responsible for issuing permits for construction and demolition activities. DOB uses excel to capture different forms of data from applicants, with the main focus on the job type. The job type can be Building, Demolition, and Alterations (Type 1, 2, and 3), respectively. Each job type also has multiple work types, for instance, general construction, elevator, plumbing work, among others. It is easy to collect and manipulate data using Excel when it involves over 1000,000 applicants seeking permits. The data set also has details about the clients such as the borough, house number, community, lot, among other relevant information needed to trace the client and the building. 

Excel Functions applied to the dataset 

The data set used in this assignment is a small part of the New York DOB’s data set as the entire data set is quite large. The data set has 59 columns and over one million rows capturing data for all the applicants applying for building, demolition, and alterations permits. 

Some of the essential excel functions include sort, filter, and Autosum. These are three standard functions used in data analysis (Winston, 2016). The sort function is essential when working with a large dataset. One can use the sorting function to group data. For example, when a DOB employee wants to view data in an alphabetical or in ascending order. The data set has information on different applicants from different boroughs, including Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens, but they are not in alphabetical order. One can use sort to arrange the data in alphabetical order such that all the data from each borough will be in one place, making it easy to identify and differentiates licenses each borough. The sort and filter button are on the far-right corner of the home tab. After pressing the sort button, the user can select the order to use in sorting. A shortcut key for sorting is ALT+H+S. 

The second function of filtering is closely related to sorting. Filtering function makes it easy to narrow down large data. The filter function can subgroup data such that one can only view the data that is relevant at that moment. For example, if an officer at DOB is interested in the data for Manhattan only can use the filtering function to filter the rest and keep Manhattan’s data only. When filtering data, click on any cell in the spreadsheet then select Home Tab. After pressing the filter button, drop down menus will appear next to each cell heading. Click on the drop-down on cell A1, click on select all and select Manhattan. The excel table will now data only for Manhattan borough, while the data for other boroughs will be hidden. 

The third function is the Autosum. This a basic and crucial data analysis tool that makes it easy to add figures in Excel cells easily. The Autosum function enables the user to automatically add up a range of cells and input results in the nearby cell. The Autosum function is used to add up numbers, for example, the total costs of permits easily. The dataset has over a million rows making it almost impossible to add each value to derive the total sum. When using the Autosum function, one creates a SUM formula of the first and the last cell in the range as follows =SUM[K2: K25] and presses enter. Excel will automatically add the values in the range. The Autosum function can be used to add values for multiple rows making it easy to summarize different data. 

References 

NYC Open Data. (n.d). DOB Permit Issuance. Retrieved from: https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Housing-Development/DOB-Permit-Issuance/ipu4- 2q9a/data 

Winston, W. (2016).  Microsoft Excel data analysis and business modeling . Microsoft press.