Excel Fundamentals for Data Analysis

By the end of this module, you will be an expert in Excel's Text functions. This module discusses ways you can extract information and manipulate data to fulfil specific business requirements. You will develop techniques for working confidently with these Excel functions and unlock the full power of Excel by manipulating and cleaning text data. This is really important because you cannot properly analyse data if it is invalid or in an unsuitable format. You will begin with the mechanics of creating a function, specifying multiple arguments, and then you will look at how to work with text in functions. You will also learn how to use multiple functions in a single formula — a technique known as nesting. The topics you will be learning this week: Functions for Combining Text; Functions for Splitting Text; Combining Text Functions; Cleaning Data & Changing Case; and Removing and replacing unwanted characters.

By the end of this module, you will be an expert in Excel's Date functions. This module discusses ways that you can extract information and manipulate data to fulfil specific business requirements. You will also

be looking at functions for converting data types: such as text to numbers, dates to text, and then both numbers and text to dates. You will learn to solve the problem of data not being in the correct format, and you will learn how to perform arithmetic operations with dates like you would with numbers, as well as performing calculations with dates. You will also learn some really great functions specifically for solving day-to-day tricky date problems that are required in business such as the WORKDAY, EDATE and EOMONTH functions. The topics you will be learning this week: Converting Data Types; Understanding dates and basic date functions; Generating valid dates; Calculating days between two dates; and Calculating dates from a given date.

In this module, you will learn about different types of cell referencing: relative cell referencing, absolute cell referencing, and mixed cell referencing. You will then learn about a great Excel functionality, Named Ranges — which is another way of referencing a cell or a range of cells by giving them a sensible name. You will see that named ranges make our formulas much easier to understand and you will also see how it makes them much easier to create — using tools such as Define Name and Create from Selection. You will also learn about Excel's Name Box and the Name Manager. You will learn some exciting Excel functions that allow you to aggregate and summarise data — such as SUMIFS and COUNTIFS, and much more. The topics you will be learning this week: Cell referencing and naming; Creating named ranges; Managing named ranges; Calculations with named ranges; and Automating processes with named ranges.

In this module, you will learn that a table in Excel is more like a database of records and fields which contains a set of related information — such as a table of inventory data. You will learn how to create, format, and manage tables, and you will learn how to easily format, select, sort, and filter in a table. You will also learn about the Total Row where you can just pick from a set of automated summarisation functions. You will learn about structured referencing — where you can continue to work with the data in a table, but the formulas look slightly different because tables use a different way to reference cells. You will also learn how to automatically extend tables whenever new data is added. The topics you will be learning this week: Creating, naming and removing tables; Formatting and selecting in tables; Sorting and filtering tables; Performing calculations with structured references; and Automating processes with tables.