Excel Skills for Data Analytics and Visualization Specialization

In an age now driven by "big data", we need to cut through the noise and present key information in a way that can be quickly consumed and acted upon making data visualization an increasingly important skill. Visualizations need to not only present data in an easy to understand and attractive way, but they must also provide context for the data, tell a story, achieving that fine balance between form and function. Excel has many rivals in this space, but it is still an excellent choice, particularly if it's where your data resides. It offers a wealth of tools for creating visualizations other than charts and the chart options available are constantly increasing and improving, so the newer versions now include waterfall charts, sunburst diagrams and even map charts. But what sets Excel apart is its flexibility, it gives us total creative control over our designs so if needed we could produce our own animated custom chart to tell the right story for our data.

Over five weeks we will explore Excel's rich selection of visualization tools using practical case studies as seen through the eyes of Rohan, an environmental analyst. Rohan is required to produce visualizations that will show trends, forecasts, breakdowns and comparisons for a large variety of environmental data sets. As well as utilising the usual chart types he wants to use conditional formats, sparklines, specialised charts and even create his own animated charts and infographics. In some cases, he will also need to prepare the data using pivot tables to drill down and answer very specific questions. We are going to help him achieve all this and present our finished visualizations in attractive reports and dashboards that use tools like slicers and macros for automation and interactivity. These are the topics we will cover: Week 1: Dynamic visualizations with conditional formatting, custom number formatting, sparklines and macros Week 2: Charting techniques for telling the right story Week 3: Creating specialised and custom charts Week 4: Summarising and filtering data with pivot tables and pivot charts Week 5: Creating interactive dashboards in Excel This is the second course in our Specialization on Data Analytics and Visualization. The first course: Excel Fundamentals for Data Analysis, covers data preparation and cleaning but also teaches some of the prerequisites for this course like tables and named ranges as well as text, lookup and logical functions. To get the most out of this course we would recommend you do the first course or have experience with these topics. In this course we focus on Data Visualization in Excel, join us for this exciting journey.

Welcome to Excel Power Tools for Data Analysis. In this four-week course, we introduce Power Query, Power Pivot and Power BI, three power tools for transforming, analysing and presenting data.

Excel's ease and flexibility have long made it a tool of choice for doing data analysis, but it does have some inherent limitations: for one, truly "big" data simply does not fit in a spreadsheet and for another, the process of importing and cleaning data can be a repetitive, time-consuming and error-prone. Over the last few years, Microsoft have worked on transforming the end-to-end experience for analysts, and Excel has undergone a major upgrade with the inclusion of Power Query and Power Pivot. In this course, we will learn how to use Power Query to automate the process of importing and preparing data for analysis. We will see how Power Pivot revolutionises the actual analysis process by providing us with an analytical database inside the Excel workbook, capable of storing millions of rows, and a powerful modelling language called DAX which allows us to perform advanced analytics on our data. We will finish off by venturing out of Excel and introducing Power BI, which also uses the Power Query and Power BI architecture but allows us to create stunning interactive reports and dashboards. This is the third course in our Specialization on Data Analytics and Visualization. The previous courses: Excel Fundamentals for Data Analysis and Data Visualization in Excel, cover data preparation, cleaning, visualisation, and creating dashboards. To get the most out of this course we would recommend you do the previous courses or have experience with these topics. In this course we focus on Excel Power Tools, join us for this exciting journey. Please note that Power Query, Power Pivot and Power BI Desktop are only available on the Windows platform, so Mac users will require Bootcamp running Windows or a Virtual machine with a Window O/S. While Power Query is available as an add-in Excel 2010 and 2013, the tools have changed significantly, and this course has only been designed and tested for Excel 2016 and later. For an optimal experience, we recommend Office 365.