Excel Fundamentals for Data Analysis

Go to Course: https://www.coursera.org/learn/excel-data-analysis-fundamentals

Introduction

### Course Review: Excel Fundamentals for Data Analysis on Coursera In today's data-driven world, the ability to analyze and manipulate data effectively is a critical skill. Microsoft Excel remains one of the premier tools for data analysis, making the **Excel Fundamentals for Data Analysis** course on Coursera a valuable asset for both beginners and seasoned professionals alike. #### Course Overview The course is the first in the **Excel Skills for Data Analysis and Visualization Specialization**. The overarching goal is to equip learners with essential Excel skills useful for analyzing data quickly, accurately, and efficiently. By the end of the course, you will have a strong grasp of various Excel tools and functions necessary to handle and analyze data competently. #### Syllabus Breakdown 1. **Welcome and Critical Information** The course begins by familiarizing you with the platform, its objectives, and the importance of mastering Excel for data analysis. 2. **Cleaning and Manipulating Text** This module dives deep into Excel's Text functions, crucial for ensuring data validity. You'll learn techniques to extract and manipulate data, including: - Functions for Combining and Splitting Text - Cleaning Data & Changing Case - Nesting Functions for complex text manipulations 3. **Working with Numbers and Dates** Dates and numbers can often be tricky in Excel. In this part of the course, you will learn how to: - Convert Data Types - Use key Date Functions (like WORKDAY and EDATE) - Perform arithmetic operations with dates and calculate the intervals between them 4. **Defined Names for Working More Effectively with Data** Understanding how to reference cells efficiently is essential. You'll master different types of cell referencing and learn about Named Ranges, which simplify formula creation and enhance clarity. Topics include: - Relative, Absolute, and Mixed Cell Referencing - Using tools like Define Name and Create from Selection 5. **Tables for Automating Data Manipulation** This module focuses on Excel Tables, teaching you how to create and manage them effectively. You’ll learn about: - Formatting, Selecting, Sorting, and Filtering tables - Structured Referencing for easier data manipulation 6. **Logical and Lookup Functions** Advance your data analysis skills through conditional logic and lookup functions. Key learnings include: - Using IF, AND, OR functions - Conducting logic tests and working with Nested IF functions - Mastering VLOOKUP, XLOOKUP, INDEX, and MATCH functions, crucial for linking datasets and error checking 7. **Final Assessment** The course concludes with a comprehensive assessment that evaluates all the skills you’ve accumulated throughout the course, worth 25% of your grade. #### Conclusion & Recommendation The **Excel Fundamentals for Data Analysis** course is an excellent starting point for anyone looking to enhance their data analysis capabilities using Excel. The course structure is logical and progressive, ensuring that learners build their skills incrementally. The content is broken down into digestible modules, making it easier to follow and understand complex concepts. I highly recommend this course to students, professionals, and anyone interested in data analysis. Whether you’re looking to enhance your job prospects, pivot your career, or simply increase your data literacy, mastering Excel is an invaluable asset. Enroll today and take the first step towards becoming proficient in one of the most essential tools in data analysis.

Syllabus

Welcome and critical information

By the end of this module, you will be an expert in Excel's Text functions. This module discusses ways you can extract information and manipulate data to fulfil specific business requirements. You will develop techniques for working confidently with these Excel functions and unlock the full power of Excel by manipulating and cleaning text data. This is really important because you cannot properly analyse data if it is invalid or in an unsuitable format. You will begin with the mechanics of creating a function, specifying multiple arguments, and then you will look at how to work with text in functions. You will also learn how to use multiple functions in a single formula — a technique known as nesting. The topics you will be learning this week: Functions for Combining Text; Functions for Splitting Text; Combining Text Functions; Cleaning Data & Changing Case; and Removing and replacing unwanted characters.

By the end of this module, you will be an expert in Excel's Date functions. This module discusses ways that you can extract information and manipulate data to fulfil specific business requirements. You will also be looking at functions for converting data types: such as text to numbers, dates to text, and then both numbers and text to dates. You will learn to solve the problem of data not being in the correct format, and you will learn how to perform arithmetic operations with dates like you would with numbers, as well as performing calculations with dates. You will also learn some really great functions specifically for solving day-to-day tricky date problems that are required in business such as the WORKDAY, EDATE and EOMONTH functions. The topics you will be learning this week: Converting Data Types; Understanding dates and basic date functions; Generating valid dates; Calculating days between two dates; and Calculating dates from a given date.

In this module, you will learn about different types of cell referencing: relative cell referencing, absolute cell referencing, and mixed cell referencing. You will then learn about a great Excel functionality, Named Ranges — which is another way of referencing a cell or a range of cells by giving them a sensible name. You will see that named ranges make our formulas much easier to understand and you will also see how it makes them much easier to create — using tools such as Define Name and Create from Selection. You will also learn about Excel's Name Box and the Name Manager. You will learn some exciting Excel functions that allow you to aggregate and summarise data — such as SUMIFS and COUNTIFS, and much more. The topics you will be learning this week: Cell referencing and naming; Creating named ranges; Managing named ranges; Calculations with named ranges; and Automating processes with named ranges.

In this module, you will learn that a table in Excel is more like a database of records and fields which contains a set of related information — such as a table of inventory data. You will learn how to create, format, and manage tables, and you will learn how to easily format, select, sort, and filter in a table. You will also learn about the Total Row where you can just pick from a set of automated summarisation functions. You will learn about structured referencing — where you can continue to work with the data in a table, but the formulas look slightly different because tables use a different way to reference cells. You will also learn how to automatically extend tables whenever new data is added. The topics you will be learning this week: Creating, naming and removing tables; Formatting and selecting in tables; Sorting and filtering tables; Performing calculations with structured references; and Automating processes with tables.

You will learn two great Excel skills in this week’s module — first, you will learn about conditional logic, and second, you will learn about automating lookups. The two of these tools together will push your data analytics to the next level! Excel has several logical functions and this module explores some of them, such as AND, OR, and IF. You will start by learning the concept of conditional logic, and how conditional logic works in Excel formulas. You will then learn to conduct logic tests and use conditional operations. For more complex logic tree scenarios, you will learn how to use nested IF functions to evaluate data. You will then learn about lookup functions — these are widely used in data analytics for connecting data sets as well as error checking. You will learn about one of the most widely used lookup functions in business — VLOOKUP, as well as other lookup functions such as INDEX and MATCH, as well as Excel newest lookup function — XLOOKUP. The topics you will be learning this week: Performing logical operations with IF; Applying advanced logical operations; Categorising data with VLOOKUP; Matching data with VLOOKUP and XLOOKUP; and Advanced data matching with INDEX and MATCH.

This is the final assessment of the course and it is worth 25% of your total grade. As this is the final assessment, it requires you to demonstrate the learning objectives from each of the weeks — and thus requires you to demonstrate all the learning objectives of the entire course.