A behind-the-scenes blog about research methods at Pew Research Center. For our latest findings, visit pewresearch.org. Identifying causal relationships from observational data is not easy. Still, ...

Most people treat Excel as a rigid calculator, completely missing its capacity for chaos. Excel's built-in randomization tools can generate numbers, shuffle existing lists, and build mock timelines in ...

Use the RANDARRAY() dynamic array function to return random names or other text in Microsoft Excel. The recent article How to generate random letters in Excel shows you how to generate random letters.

Make your R data.table code more efficient and elegant with these special symbols and operators. Plus, learn about the new fcase() function R data.table code becomes more efficient — and elegant — ...

For some data.table users, “dot-SD” is a bit of a mystery. But data.table creator Matt Dowle told me that it’s actually quite simple: Just think of it as a symbol representing “each group.” Let’s go ...