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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Mastering Data Analysis in Excel by Duke University

4.2
stars
3,908 ratings

About the Course

Important: The focus of this course is on math - specifically, data-analysis concepts and methods - not on Excel for its own sake. We use Excel to do our calculations, and all math formulas are given as Excel Spreadsheets, but we do not attempt to cover Excel Macros, Visual Basic, Pivot Tables, or other intermediate-to-advanced Excel functionality. This course will prepare you to design and implement realistic predictive models based on data. In the Final Project (module 6) you will assume the role of a business data analyst for a bank, and develop two different predictive models to determine which applicants for credit cards should be accepted and which rejected. Your first model will focus on minimizing default risk, and your second on maximizing bank profits. The two models should demonstrate to you in a practical, hands-on way the idea that your choice of business metric drives your choice of an optimal model. The second big idea this course seeks to demonstrate is that your data-analysis results cannot and should not aim to eliminate all uncertainty. Your role as a data-analyst is to reduce uncertainty for decision-makers by a financially valuable increment, while quantifying how much uncertainty remains. You will learn to calculate and apply to real-world examples the most important uncertainty measures used in business, including classification error rates, entropy of information, and confidence intervals for linear regression. All the data you need is provided within the course, all assignments are designed to be done in MS Excel, and you will learn enough Excel to complete all assignments. The course will give you enough practice with Excel to become fluent in its most commonly used business functions, and you’ll be ready to learn any other Excel functionality you might need in the future (module 1). The course does not cover Visual Basic or Pivot Tables and you will not need them to complete the assignments. All advanced concepts are demonstrated in individual Excel spreadsheet templates that you can use to answer relevant questions. You will emerge with substantial vocabulary and practical knowledge of how to apply business data analysis methods based on binary classification (module 2), information theory and entropy measures (module 3), and linear regression (module 4 and 5), all using no software tools more complex than Excel....

Top reviews

TB

Nov 16, 2021

I like and appreciate courses provided through Coursera.This course is very interesting and valuable for those whose jobs do have relevance with data management .God bless Coursera and Duke University

JE

Oct 30, 2015

The course deserves a 5-star rating because: (1) content is relevant, (2) the professor is concise and possesses great teaching skills, and (3) the learning modules are applicable to daily problems.

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426 - 450 of 934 Reviews for Mastering Data Analysis in Excel

By Jose C S M

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Feb 11, 2016

Great!

By Marica C

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Dec 13, 2015

Great!

By HUILIN M

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Dec 2, 2015

useful

By raghav d

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Aug 28, 2021

great

By DAMPANABOINA S

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Nov 28, 2020

nice

By Arya s

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Oct 28, 2020

Best

By Md. R Q S

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Oct 10, 2020

good

By Dishant P

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Feb 12, 2020

Nice

By Chirag K

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Sep 27, 2019

Good

By Meenal C

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Dec 5, 2018

ccol

By Bharath M

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Jul 3, 2017

good

By Кирилл

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Apr 7, 2017

Nice

By Kyle A

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Feb 22, 2016

Ver

By Małgorzata P

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Feb 10, 2016

:)

By ISHAAN S

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Jul 27, 2021

-

By Michal K

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Oct 7, 2017

V

By winnielou

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Oct 24, 2016

k

By Al S

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Dec 16, 2015

e

By Tania K

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Dec 8, 2015

.

By Madeline K

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Mar 16, 2021

This was a good course for anyone looking to learn advanced excel analytics techniques. I learned a lot and the quizzes and final project give sufficient hands on practice to go along with the videos.

The reason I am not giving this course 5 stars is because there were times when the instructor rushes through some of the concepts in the course. I had a hard time following along at times and had to do a lot of reading in the forums to understand how to complete the final project. I would not rate this as a beginner course, these are advanced data analytics techniques requiring using calculus and statistics in excel. There are also some errors in the quizzes and I found that the course mentors are not super active in the forums -- many of their posts and tips being from 3-4 years ago.

All that said, I don't want my review to deter folks from taking this course. I learned a lot and I feel very accomplished that I completed it and I am walking away with a thorough understanding of the topics. I'd still recommend this course to anyone who is willing to put in extra hours outside of the course to do your own research, spend time with the spreadsheets, and use the forums.

By Don N D

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Jul 21, 2023

This course is very useful for learning about statistics and data science at a very surface level. However if you're looking to learn more about how to use Excel itself like pivot tables and Vlookups, this course unfortunately doesn't teach you all that much. That being said, I still found this course to be quite valuable if you're able to power through.

Cons:

This course is old; it is very old. This course is like 7 years old in that I think this came out in like 2017. The course structure is very messy in that a lot of spreadsheets that you actually need to use for the final project don't always correspond to the spreadsheet they suggest you use. You also often have to read the discussions or go to the course resource page to figure out how to actually use the spreadsheets. Worse yet, the course hasn't even been updated in a while and the questions on the weekly quizzes reflect that.

The difficulty spike can seem ridiculous at times. You can see it early on when you jump from week 1 to week 2 and on part 1 of the final project. Because of this, this course may take a while longer than the course estimates.

By Isa P

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Jun 3, 2018

This course was a rigorous introduction to using Excel for the specific purpose of solving data analytics problems. The challenges were fun and rewarding for those who love mathematics, applications to real-world data problems, and who are comfortable with wrestling with complex concepts independently. The core components of this course were binary classifications, linear regression, and the supporting mathematical and statistical theorems. While the first two weeks of the course were a very steep learning curve (even for a student with a B.A. in Applied Mathematics), the supplemental explanations after submitting assignments helped the learning process. I wished such structure and explanatory post-quiz materials persisted through weeks 3-6 of the course. This would have made it more rewarding, as I came away wishing I could review my weaker areas.

By Yun Q N

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Sep 17, 2020

After completing the course, I'd like to say that the title of the course seems quite misleading as it focuses very much on math and statistical concepts behind some of the commonly used techniques and not so much on using excel to perform data analysis. It's interesting to know the concepts behind, but I have to admit that I struggled with the course as I've not touched advanced maths and statistics since college almost 2 decades ago.

From the peer review assignment, it appears that I'm not the only one struggling with the course. One suggestion to Duke University would be to set up screening of the peer review assignments and single out those that have exceptionally short responses, out of 5 that I reviewed, 2 submissions have only (.) in its response. That surely shouldn't be allowed

By Max H

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Dec 13, 2015

Entering this course with a pretty in-depth knowledge of Excel, it was good to be able to brush up on some things I don't use on a day-to-day basis such as VLOOKUP and STANDARDIZE functions. The subject material is quite good, AOC and Binary Classifications were very interesting to learn about and have tons of applications, particularly in operation optimization problems/cases. One point of suggestion would be to double-check and clean up the accompanying Excel files. Some of the material was confusing to follow along with. If you could define cells, arrays, and tables for instance it would make the material much more intuitive to follow-along with.

By Evan D

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Feb 22, 2021

I learned new things, and each time something clicked I felt like it was a huge achievement. Overall, I found this course very hard. Things build on each other so if you don't get any of the steps along the way, then you can't really move on. I think it is anticipated that you have a deeper knowledge of algebra and other concepts in general than I have. This is supposed to take 6 weeks, and it took me 13 weeks, so basically twice as long. To be fair, I spanned the holiday season as well, but overall it took me much longer to complete things than the outline suggests.