Data Analysis And Business Intelligence With Microsoft Excel

The first thing you need to know about this course, is that this is NOT your granddad’s Excel.

Instead of the same old spreadsheet stuff, we’ll do a deep dive on a truly revolutionary set of tools that empower you to do industrial-strength Business Intelligence: the art and science of transforming data – usually massive amounts of it – into meaningful, actionable insights.

In the past, doing “real” BI meant using expensive enterprise software that only a select few people would have access to anyway. But with what you’ll learn in this course, you’ll be building robust Business Intelligence solutions in no time, using nothing more than an Excel spreadsheet on your desktop.

• First up, we’ll dive into Power Query, a feature-packed yet easy to use tool for extracting, transforming, and loading (ETL for short) data from just about any source you can imagine into Excel. From text files to databases, wherever the data you want to analyze might be stored, you can use Power Query to pull it into Excel, and then transform it however you need to support your analysis.

• Next, there’s an optional section on Pivot Tables, just in case you’re not already familiar with them. While Pivot Tables may not be a revolutionary new feature in and of themselves, they nonetheless play a crucial role in the Excel Business Intelligence landscape.

• We’ll then learn to turn those Pivot Tables into “Power” Pivot Tables, by connecting them to the Excel Data Model…which is basically a relational database that lives right inside your Excel spreadsheet! This will allow us to mash up and analyze multiple datasets in a single Pivot Table…no VLOOKUPS required!

  And remember how Excel usually starts to sputter out once you try to play around with more than a couple hundred thousand rows of data? No more! Power Pivot let’s you work with up to hundreds of millions of records in a single Excel file.

• Then, so we can get the absolute most out of our Data Model (and into our Power Pivot Tables), we’ll learn DAX, an incredibly powerful formula language for creating complex calculations that you can drop right into your Pivots.

  Since the basics of DAX syntax are easy to pick up if you’re already familiar with Excel formulas, we’ll venture into advanced topics like Time Intelligence, Iterator Functions, and Variables; and with exercises after almost every video, you’ll have plenty of opportunities to master what you’ve learned, right after you learn it.

• Of course, all that number crunching doesn’t help much if we can’t present those numbers in an intuitive, easily digestible way. That’s why I close the course out with a series of powerful visualization techniques – from conditional formatting to Pivot Charts – that will transform your calculations into insights that can be used to make real-world decisions.

  We’ll even explore techniques for building dynamic dashboards in Excel, using Slicers and Timelines to not only filter our charts, but actually change the metrics we display in them. And all supported by the Data Model’s capacity for juggling hundreds of millions of rows of data in a single spreadsheet.

And in each section, I use hands-on demos, practical examples, and intuitive, common-sense explanations to teach you these concepts in a way that will help you see the connection between your new skills and the problems you’re trying to solve on the job.

But just as importantly, I’ve packed the course with TONS of exercises – ranging from straightforward to challenging – that will help you retain, and even build on, what you’ve learned.

So if you want to master these game-changing tools and build professional-grade Business Intelligence solutions right on your desktop, all you need is Microsoft Excel – and this course – to do it. I look forward to seeing you there!