What courses should I take to learn the Data skills/tools I need?

[Vle045]

I know we have some Data people here, so I am hoping I can get right to the nitty gritty.   I don’t necessarily need a “degree” nor a certification.  But for my job, I think I could refine some of my processes if I could learn these things.   It could be a simple YouTube video.   I have looked for some of this myself, but I am not sure I am finding the right things…..

• Excel - Best utilization for “Queries & Connections”.  How can I update data between various spreadsheets without having to merge through Ablebits.
  
• Excel - Pivot Tables.   I don’t know a dang thing about Pivot tables and if/how to use them.
  
• Excel or Sheets - How can we have a bunch of separate sheets (that are accessed by specific departments/staff) and those sheets merge in to one giant main sheet and Vice Versa?  Is that even possible?
  

[rachel83az]

I would suggest that IBM's Data Analysis and Visualization Foundations Specialization probably has most/all of what you need, but it's not included with Coursera Plus. So I don't know if you want to spend money on that. The Google one looks like it focuses on Python and SQL, not spreadsheets.

[Vle045]

I will take a look at that. Maybe it’s part of the American Dream Academy options.

[ThatBankDude]

I would be lying if I said I was an Excel guru. I typically use data that comes from Excel and read it into R Studio to do my data manipulation and analysis.

[smartdegree]

I know we have some Data people here, so I am hoping I can get right to the nitty gritty.   I don’t necessarily need a “degree” nor a certification.  But for my job, I think I could refine some of my processes if I could learn these things.   It could be a simple YouTube video.   I have looked for some of this myself, but I am not sure I am finding the right things…..

• Excel - Best utilization for “Queries & Connections”.  How can I update data between various spreadsheets without having to merge through Ablebits.
  
• Excel - Pivot Tables.   I don’t know a dang thing about Pivot tables and if/how to use them.
  
• Excel or Sheets - How can we have a bunch of separate sheets (that are accessed by specific departments/staff) and those sheets merge in to one giant main sheet and Vice Versa?  Is that even possible?
  

For points 1&3, that is easy to do using VBA code.  You don't even need a course for that.  Just google or youtube it or post your question on stackoverflow.com and someone will give you the VBA code you can just cut and paste.   Unfortunately, a lot of this you cannot learn through a standard course, as sometimes what you want to do is very specific and requires a specific script that isn't well known. 

For point 2, think of pivot tables having 3 components: the filter, the metric (or variable) and the slicer.  The filter will allow you to remove or include only some items that fit that criteria.  The metric is what you are looking at - for example, income, sales, headcount, etc.  The slicer is something you use to slice the metric - you can do it by year, location, etc.   As long as you understand those 3 concepts and where to put them in the pivot, it should be straightforward.  However, if you are working on the database the pivot is based on, you need more advanced excel stuff and basics on relational databases such as primary keys, etc.  

Pivot tables are important because they are the first step for many moving towards big data analysis.  Once you understand filters, slicers and relational databases, you can scale the same process over millions of rows and records.  Excel is limited to in terms of rows/columns, and that's where big data comes in - tools like SAS, R, etc actually do a lot of the same things you would do with Excel, except you can go beyond Excel's data size limitations.

[allvia]

Here are two from Coursera that may interest you (and they are included as part of the plus)

https://www.coursera.org/specializations/excel-mysql
Excel to MySQL: Analytic Techniques for Business

Excel Skills for Business
https://www.coursera.org/specializations/excel

[bjcheung77]

You don't need the degree for sure, but it would be nice to have some extra certification, especially if it's very affordable. The main reason for that is to have yourself follow a guideline/timeline and be accountable to completing the certification on a schedule. If you're doing this using a DIY YouTube video, you may skip or wander off pace and will take longer to get back on track to "learning"...

[Vle045]

Thank you everyone. I took a look at pivot tables and found the slicer. Pretty sweet. I track a lot of data for about 1500 students - and a lot of it changes daily. Some of the terms you have mentioned (SAS, R, VBA code) are all things I have seen in course descriptions but had no idea what they meant. (So it was hard to figure out what covered what I wanted to learn)

And I think you have a point Bjcheung77. That’s probably why I can get about halfway there with some things. I usually can get to a point where I have what I need but maybe not the *most* efficient way.
I am setting up formulas to do all the things that a pivot table could be doing for me.

[sanantone]

Tableau, R, Python, SQL, and stats courses. Those who are heavily on the stats side might need to know SAS, STATA, or SPSS. When I worked in data for the government, my agency was kind of primitive, so we used Excel for analysis and SAP BusinessObjects for visualization.