Analyzing and Visualizing Data with Excel

Excel for Data Analysis and Visualization is an intermediate level course offered by Microsoft through the edX platform that covers cutting edge techniques for gathering, transforming and viewing data in Excel. The course focuses on getting students up to speed with new features and techniques offered in Excel 2016, such as the Excel data model, queries, DAX (a syntax of defining functions) and Power BI, an online productivity service that integrates with Excel. This course assumes you have some familiarity with MS Excel, particularly pivot tables and slicers. You can complete the course with Excel 2010 or 2013, but if you don't have Excel 2016 you'll have to download add ins and you'll have to work slightly harder to complete the assignments. Grading is based on 7 weekly labs and 12 comprehension quizzes.

Weekly content in DAT206x consists of one to three short video lectures describing new Excel features followed by a comprehension quiz. The amount of video content per week is usually under 30 minutes, so you shouldn't need to commit more than an hour or two a week to complete the course. The lecture videos have adequate resolution to see cell values and lecturer's presentation is easy to follow. Weeks 1-7 have lab assignments that let you apply the techniques presented lecture. You only get a couple of submissions for most lab and quiz questions, but most questions are not too difficult.

Excel for Data Analysis and Visualization is a succinct, informative course on new Excel features that is worth checking out for those interested in going beyond the basics. Using Excel 2016 for this course when it launched only a few months before the course debuted may partially be a ploy to convince Excel users to upgrade, but I can't fault Microsoft for teaching with the latest version of their own product and I completed the course with Excel 2010 without much difficulty.

I give Excel for Data Analysis and Visualization 4 out of 5 stars: very good.

Good course. Definitely a game-changer in terms of Excel. The main focus is on Power Query, Data Models and DAX (new language in Excel). The course is not extremely difficult to take, but some prior Excel usage would be recommended. Great intro to Analysis on Excel.

The course and its content is great, but sometimes the presentation can be lacking. For example there are compatibility issues depending on the version of Excel you are running. They tackle this in the beginning but there are instances where the course gives you a task to complete, then a quiz to take based on the task, then AFTER those two activities, they tell you what to do if you have issues completing the task due to compatibility issues. This should be listed in the beginning of the assignment, not AFTER the assignment has been completed. People who are having issues with compatibility will not make it to that page.

Additionally, some poorly worded questions that leave you scratching your head and scrolling down to the discussion section where you see other students have raised the same concerns.

Overall though, the good outweighs the bad, and the information you learn really breathes new life into Excel from an analysis perspective. Previously, due to size limitations, Excel was just a dumping ground for me after I had aggregated data on a database like SQL Server. Now, thanks to the flexibility that Data Models create, it has much more functionality for me.