Introduction - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems
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line:15% <v ->Hello, and welcome to this live lesson on data analysis</v> line:15% fundamentals with Excel. line:15% My name is Chris Sorensen. line:15% <v ->And my name is Ammul Shergill.</v> <v ->During this live lesson we will introduce</v> many Excel capabilities and best practices that are fundamental to setting up complex and sustainable data analysis models. First a little bit about myself. For the past 20 years, I've been involved with data analytics in some form or fashion across the Microsoft suite of products. I'm the founder and president of Iteration Insights. I'm a Microsoft certified trainer. I'm a Microsoft certified solutions expert in data analytics, and I'm the author of Analyzing and Visualizing Data with Microsoft Excel which was published by Microsoft press. I'm an architect, coach, trainer, and speaker. And I'm also a community leader in the business applications and Azure suite of products. <v ->And now a little bit about myself.</v> I'm a principal consultant at StratSyn Consulting. Over the last 15 years, I have designed implemented and supported risk Excel based solutions. My other engagements have required strategic business analysis, portfolio planning, management reporting, project management and technical leadership. Through these engagements I have had the opportunity to consult for individual professionals, small medium-sized businesses as well as large multinational corporations within various industries. Over the last few years I have been leveraging Microsoft 365 and Power Platform to provide consulting services related to advanced Excel modeling, data cleanup and processing, business data analysis, and other business intelligence solutions. <v ->We will be your guides as we explore and introduce</v> the fundamentals of data analysis with Excel. In my current role, I'm the president of Iteration Insights and I'm heavily involved in enabling organizations to become more data-driven. You'll be hard pressed to find an organization this day and age that does not want to become more data-driven. The big question is, how do we get there? As you might imagine, this involves much more than implementing technologies alone. At the ground level, it really starts with producing reliable data. Which can be later consumed to produce an accurate and timely picture of business performance. As you'll see throughout this course, there's a lot we can do to better enable this. Most organizations have a love-hate relationship with Excel, and this is for a variety of reasons. But Excel is a powerful tool when used properly. Admittedly, I spent a lot of years helping organizations that have struggled with data quality issues relating to Excel based solutions. As a data consumer, it was relatively easy to focus on Excel as the root cause. But now that I reflect back I realized there was more to the story. My lack of perspective was due to the fact that I mostly spent time as a data consumer and rarely walked in the shoes of a data producer. We find this disconnect is not uncommon across most organizations. So what is the root cause of this? We trace it back to a few reasons. First being, training and education on how to best use Excel. Most people just figure it out on the fly. Secondly, there's a general lack of understanding of best practices around how to build complex, sustainable and shareable models. And lastly, a lack of understanding for data life cycle and where stakeholders fit. Let's just say this, Excel is not going anywhere. It's use is ubiquitous and flexible. It's used to manage the entire processes or to augment processes in operational systems. <v ->For the content of this course, We assume you're</v> comfortable with the basic Excel features and capabilities related to menus and navigation, work with components, and authoring formulas. During this live lesson, we want to demonstrate how to design, build and share complex Excel solutions that can be sustained over the longterm. We suggest to you to be patient as we discuss some concepts and best practices that might not make sense right out of the gate. We will continuously reinforce these themes and highlight their benefits as we progress through the materials. The topics we'll discuss will include, getting started with data analysis in Excel, using get and transform data, structuring and referencing data for analysis, preparing and analyzing data, authoring interactive reports and setting up for collaboration and distribution. <v ->Do we still have you?</v> We hope so. We have lots to learn. So let's get started.