Using Spreadsheets for Organizing Data 

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  • Instructor: Ross Dickson 
  • Level: Beginner
  • Duration: 3 hours
  • Helpers: Chris Geroux & Serguei Vassiliev 
  • Date:  January 28, 2026 | 1:00 - 4:00 pm (Atlantic)
  • Prerequisite: None
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COURSE DESCRIPTION

Good data organization is the foundation of any research project. Most researchers have data in spreadsheets, so it’s the starting place for many research projects. To use tools that make computation and analysis more efficient, such as programming languages like R or Python, we need to structure our data the way that computers need the data. This workshop aims to teach researchers basic concepts, skills, and tools for working with data to get more done quickly and with less pain. In this lesson, you will learn good data entry practices, how to avoid common formatting mistakes, approaches for handling dates in spreadsheets, basic quality control and data manipulation, and exporting data from spreadsheets. 

SETUP REQUIREMENTS
  • To interact with spreadsheets, you can use LibreOffice, Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, or other programs. For this lesson, if you don’t have a spreadsheet program already, you can install LibreOffice. It’s a free, open source spreadsheet program.

Meet our team!

Ross Dickson

Instructor

Lead Research Consultant

Ph.D. Computational Chemistry, Queen’s University

ITIL Foundation Certificate

Based at Dalhousie University, Ross joined ACENET in 2007 as a Research Consultant. His responsibilities span education, documentation, and client support, and he manages job scheduling policies on ACENET’s high-performance computing clusters. He has worked with users across many disciplines including chemistry, physics, biology, oceanography, neuroscience, several engineering disciplines, philosophy, and management studies. Following his doctoral and postdoctoral studies in computational chemistry, Ross worked in software development for Hypercube Inc., makers of HyperChem for Windows, and for Molecular Mining Corporation where he helped specify some of the earliest software for analyzing high-throughput gene expression data.

Sarah Clarke

Host

Digital Training Specialist
MSc Computational Chemistry, Dalhousie University

Sarah, based in Nova Scotia, joined ACENET in 2023. She has a range of teaching experience and held regular teaching assistant positions during her studies. Passionate about scientific literacy, Sarah has developed teaching materials and taught programming and robotics to youth in St. John's with Brilliant Labs. She has also led professional development workshops for teachers, focusing on digital skills. Most recently, Sarah was one of the principals who developed and taught ACENET’s 100-hour online Microcredential in Advanced Computing. For her MSc in Computational Chemistry research, she focused on interfacing crystal structure prediction methods.

Chris Geroux

Helper

Digital Research Consultant, Cloud Specialist
Ph.D. Astrophysics, Saint Mary’s University

Chris has been working in HPC since 2005 and joined ACENET in 2015. He is based at Dalhousie University and has a focus on big data. During his PhD he developed a multi-dimensional hydrodynamics code utilizing the parallel environment at ACENET to explore the interaction of convection and radial pulsation in RR Lyrae variable stars. A key component of this work was developing a domain decomposition framework using OpenMPI to parallelize the code.

More recently he was an associate research fellow at the University of Exeter where he worked on a team of international researchers. Key roles included the continued development of a hydrodynamics code, analysis and visualization of the resulting large datasets, development and maintenance of command-line tools used by the group, and to conduct novel research. His focus was on understanding how newly accreted material is redistributed by convection in young forming stars, and how the existing convection is modified by the accretion of new material.

In addition to these formal roles Chris also has interests in visualization and 3D computer graphics.

Serguei Vassiliev

Helper

Digital Research Consultant (Fredericton)
Ph.D., Biophysics, Moscow State University, Russia
Certificate of Competency, Fundamentals of Accelerated Computing with Modern CUDA C++
Serguei joined ACENET in 2019 as a Research Consultant at UNB. His background is in experimental and computational biophysics. After doctoral and postdoctoral studies in biophysics of photosynthesis, Serguei was Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship recipient at the Technical University of Berlin where he studied energy conversion in natural and artificial photosynthetic systems using ultrafast laser spectroscopy. More recently he was working as a research associate at Brock University with Dr. Douglas Bruce, where he was engaged in inter-disciplinary research of photosynthesis, integrating biology, computational chemistry, physics and data science. Working at Brock University, Serguei developed specialized programs for global and target analysis of time-resolved spectroscopic data, and analysis of molecular dynamics trajectories. After joining ACENET, he developed a Practical Molecular Dynamics course covering such aspects of biomolecular simulations as the theory of MD simulations, molecular visualization, preparing, carrying out, and analyzing simulations in the national HPC environment.
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