Business Data Analysis with Microsoft Excel and Power BI

Excel recognizes only four data types. Anything you type into Excel will fall under one of these data types. In this lecture we will set some of the foundation knowledge you will need to work productively in Excel.

This builds up on the knowledge established in Lecture 2. Excel is different from the other software in the Microsoft Office suite and has its own special set of guidelines to make the most of it. We will be going into those general rules you need to master to be very proficient in the use of Excel for business purposes.

Almost everything you enter in Excel -- reports, raw data -- are in table format. However there are some special types that I refer to as datatable. In this lecture I will explain what they are and why they need to be handled differently.

I will introduce you to sorting in Excel. Talk about the recommended way to sort. Do examples that cover the usual top to bottom sorting, then the left to right sorting, and cascaded sorting.

I will show via a relevant example how to do filtering and the benefits.

I will cover removing duplicates, text-to-column, subtotal and data validation.

I'll show you how to use the "Format as Table" tool. Also how to set up your Excel sheet for printing. And finally how to put some of your analysis/report directly in the body of an email.

I'll show you the most commonly used charts. Explaining when to use each and how to create them. The main charts covered are Column chart, Bar chart, Pie Chart and other chart types.

Continuation of charts.

I'll show you some creative uses of Excel.

I'll show you some creative uses of Excel.

I'll show you more creative uses of Excel

I'll show you my favourite Excel keyboard shortcuts.

I'll demystify the PivotTable for you with an interesting easy to follow example. I will also teach you how to insert a PivotChart and work with PowerPivot.

I'll show you how to use mail merge feature of Microsoft Word in conjuction with Excel and Outlook.

This is one of the core lectures in the training course. It covers linking sheets, duplicating sheets, freezing panes, splitting windows and conditional formatting.

This covers VLOOKUP, HLOOKUP, INDEX and MATCH. It is another core lecture in this training.

I'll be showing you how to make sales (or any other metric) forecast using the new forecast tool in Excel 2016. Don't forget to download the practice along file.

This is a lecture to show you a creative use of PivotTable for a dynamic analysis.

I'll explain to you some important tips to remember in making business reports and presentation data from Excel.

I teach you the benefits and how to create a named range. I'll also cover Goal Seek and Scenario Manager.

I'll show you how to protect a worksheet, a workbook structure and the Excel file.

I'll show you a creative use of the Excel web query.

This is another core lecture. I'll cover the power Excel functions: IF, SUM, SUMIFS, COUNTIFS, LEFT, RIGHT, MID and many others.

Update to the Power Excel Function List. I've included SUMPRODUCT as it is a very powerful function and can be creatively used to set up a neat template.

I explained in-depth its use for simple calculations and complex calculations.

One common situation most users of Excel face in making recurrent reports -- daily reports, weekly reports, monthly reports etc -- is that of updating the raw data part of the report with the new data for the period they are creating report for.

As simple as this looks, it is often a boring, repetitive and time consuming task. It could mean having to copy and paste data from the new source data files every day. For some people who get data from different sources (branches, sales people, departments etc), that coping and pasting can easily become a 20 mins task with potentials for human errors.

How do you set up your report to automatically pull in new data from source files? PowerQuery is the answer.

Setting up a Power BI account, installing the Power BI desktop and taking you through a sample interesting project.

Continuation of the sample project in part 1.

CROSSJOIN enables you to create an interesting combination (cartesian product) of rows from two or more tables.

CALCULATE is the most popular, and perhaps, most important formula, in Excel. It enables you to change filter context in your calculations, making you achieve the equivalent of Excel's SUMIF, COUNTIF, SUBTOTAL and more.

VALUES gets you the list/table of unique records in a specified table or column. It is a must know DAX formula.

CALENDAR allows you to easily create a date table.

SUMMARIZE generates the equivalent of an SQL SELECT and GROUP BY command.

I'll introduce you to creating Excel macros just by pressing a button twice. Excel macros are that easy!

We will dive in deeper into Excel Macros by creating an interactive form for a user to enter in data into a table in Excel. It's a very interesting example you will definitely find more use for.