How Data Analysts Use ChatGPT
Here's an overview of what ChatGPT can do for data analysts.
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Since ChatGPT was released I’ve been using it to make my life easier as a data analyst.
In the beginning, I used ChatGPT to help me with Python, but after OpenAI released the Plugin Store and the Code Interpreter, I used ChatGPT for more than writing or debugging code, but to do some tasks I frequently do as a data analyst such as doing research, collecting data, creating reports and more.
Here’s how I’ve been using ChatGPT as a data analyst.
Using ChatGPT Plugins to do a quick research
When I start a new project, the first thing I do is gather all the information already available about the topic in question. This usually involves searching on Google and reading research papers.
What better way to do all this than with the help of ChatGPT?
There are some ChatGPT plugins that help me when doing research. Here are some I use.
Link Reader: LinkReader is very useful for internet research. This plugin can help us summarize the content of links, so we can have an overview of a complete article before reading it.
Ask Your PDF: This is a good option when you have a paper in PDF format. You can upload the PDF and ask it to summarize it for you.
After I have enough information about the topic in question, I collect data to start the analysis. ChatGPT helps me with that too.
Using Code Interpreter and the “Scraper” plugin for Web Scraping
When it comes to collecting data from the internet, ChatGPT comes in handy.
There’s a drawback, though. If you try using GPT-3.5, ChatGPT will tell you that as an AI tool, it can’t perform web scraping. Fortunately, there are some ChatGPT plugins that can do web scraping for us in seconds!
First, there’s Scraper. This ChatGPT plugin lets us scrape websites with 1 prompt. Say you want to extract data from a news website. You only have to install the Scraper plugin and use the prompt below.
scrape the headlines, date published and description from the articles listed in this website: [insert link]
Then you can tell ChatGPT to put the data in a table so that you can easily copy/paste it into a spreadsheet.
The scraper plugin is cool but has some drawbacks. It doesn’t let you export the data in a CSV file and won’t let you scrape all websites out there because it’s against the ToS of some websites.
In such cases, there’s a very good alternative — ChatGPT Code Interpreter. Here’s a quick demo of web scraping with the Code Interpreter.
The best part of the code interpreter is that it allows you to download all the data in a CSV file!
Using Code Interpreter to generate reports
ChatGPT Code Interpreter is good at doing stuff with Python code and one of those things it can help us do is data analysis!
We only need to upload our dataset and either let ChatGPT do a quick analysis for us or specify which type of analysis we want to carry out.
Here’s how the code interpreter creates a quick report from a population dataset.
Analyze the dataset and make charts and graphs to show the major trends in population growth around the world
As you can see, first, it gives a quick summary of the dataset and then provides some visualizations (with code included).
Things get more interesting if you add more details to your prompt in order to customize the report you get. In the next article, we’ll dive deeper into ChatGPT Code Interpreter. I’ll show you step by step how to do web scraping and create customized reports with the Code Interpreter.
… and that’s not all you can do much more with ChatGPT as a data analyst. For more, join my course to learn Python, SQL, and ChatGPT for data analysis.