Cleaning Up 58 Spreadsheets To Better Understand The Government Budget

10 Aug 2015

After you download 58 spreadsheets, and upload them to Google Spreadsheets, you begint o get a better look at what is involved with understanding how our government spends.

You have to first understand the 16 sections, and multiple subsections available from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), then get to work on the numerous ways the data to support each area is published.

With each spreadsheet I faced new challenges in standardizing the spreadsheet, worksheet, and colum names, while also trying to merge, shift and make the data contained in each spreadsheet more coherent, while also flattening it for export as CSV.

After I upload, and normalized all 58 spreadsheets using Google, the data was ready for publishing as APIs using APISpark, and exporting as individual CSV files for conversion to JSON.

The goal of this is to come out of it with 58 Google Spreadsheets without any formatting that are ready for importing into APISpark , and 58 separate CSV files for conversion--mission accomplished.