Data collection for business analysis

Yandex.View, SurveyMonkey, Google Forms or Typeform

These services are typically used to conduct surveys and collect data. But there are more interesting possibilities, for example:

embedding a questionnaire into the product (registration, etc.),

advertising and search for respondents for the questionnaire,

a programmable questionnaire in which you can write a script for displaying questions.

Yandex.Vzglyad helps to collect answers to short questionnaires by name, demand, and preferences of respondents. SurveyMonkey offers the same opportunities, but the service does not promote questionnaires among the audience in Russia.

Examples of tasks for such tools:

creating a brief to fill out for a client or a questionnaire for interviews with company employees,

simplified process of collecting data on transactions, tasks, number of hours of employees.

Basic skills for business analysis

Parsing: how to transfer a table from a pdf file to Excel using Smallpdf (the simplest example for beginners)

The task is to collect data for an internal report on the state of the mining industry. For analysis, you will need data from large analytical companies consolidated in an Excel file.

In the PWC report "Mining 2019 Resources for the Future" we find an interesting table with the financial performance of the forty largest mining companies in the world for 2017-2018 and the PWC forecast for 2019.

We copy the table in the usual way ⟶ the format is not saved, all data is transferred to one cell:

In order not to transfer numbers one by one, we will use the Smallpdf program.

Select the "PDF Converter" function and download the pdf report. Click "Convert to Excel Format" and "Select an option →".

After converting, download the file and get a beautiful source table: