Screen Link:
https://app.dataquest.io/m/294/guided-project%3A-exploring-ebay-car-sales-data/5/exploring-the-date-columns
I’ve been browsing the community posts about step 5 for Ebay car sales because I’ve been confused regarding the instructions. My confusion stems from the following statement in the activity description:
Right now, the
date_crawled
,last_seen
, andad_created
columns are all identified as string values by pandas. Because these three columns are represented as strings, we need to convert the data into a numerical representation so we can understand it quantitatively.
This statement implies that part of our workflow should be converting the dates in the three columns from strings to datetime objects. However, no such instructions are provided as part of the workflow. Like many others on these forums, I was confused because it seems odd to me to generate summary data on strings rather than dates.
Could someone clarify whether we’re supposed to convert the strings in this step? Or are we supposed to follow the instructions without the data conversion? Thanks.