Excel Skills for Data Analytics and Visualization Specialization

As data becomes the modern currency, so the ability to analyse the data quickly and accurately has become of paramount importance. Excel with its extraordinarily broad range of features and capabilities is one of the most widely used programs for doing this. In the first course of our Excel Skills for Data Analysis and Visualization Specialization, you will learn the fundamentals of Excel for data analysis. When you have completed the course, you will be able to use a range of Excel tools and functions to clean and prepare data for analysis; automate data analysis with the help of Named Ranges and Tables; and use logical and lookup functions to transform, link and categorise data.

This course will enable you to build a strong foundation in the fundamentals, helping you to be more efficient in your day-to-day and developing the necessary skills to work with the more advanced techniques used in later courses. To make the content easy to relate to and to personalize the learning experience, we are going to follow Zara's journey through the course. Who is Zara? Well, she is no-one and everyone. You will find that Zara's trials and tribulations sound familiar, and together with Zara, you will develop your Excel skills along the way — and, importantly, have some fun doing it. The Excel Skills for Data Analytics and Visualization courses are the sequel to one of most successful specializations on Coursera, Excel Skills for Business, which has attracted hundreds of thousands of learners and top ratings. Transform your skills, your confidence, and your opportunities by adding this new set of skills to your repertoire.

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.