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

While I found this course useful, it was originally advertised with the Data Analytics Specialization from Duke University, and it says that you need no previous knowledge to complete the specialization. I found this course VERY challenging and I think it is because of my limited experience in the fields of statistics and calculus. There were many times when vocabulary, formulas, calculations, etc. are mentioned quickly and I felt a little left behind. With some background in business statistics I think this class would be much more effective.

Really interesting course and material and a very good instructor. This would be a 5 stars course if it wasn't for the final project. During lessons some concepts of statistics were taken as known (which is okay). However the final project required to utilize a combination of all new learned material on a whole different level of difficulty compared to the preceding quizzes. I did not expect that jump in difficulty and enjoyed the course a lot but the final project just was a struggle.

The Course is fine, explanations and videos are a bit hard to follow at times.

The final assessment is in my opinion very bad, as it i appears to me quite unrelated to the course it self. The lectures are quite abstract and the exam is a practical application of the concept.

The instructions of the course also aren't very good as you need to do each part of the final project at the end of each week.

I would strongly suggest to not take this course unless you have many spare hours.

The course covers some good topics, but it is not introductory due to the requirement that you have prior knowledge of statistics. I found the lectures got progressively more confusing with few examples of how to apply the knowledge. If you take the time to figure out what is actually being asked and how to do it in the spreadsheets provided you can learn something, but the amount of time wasted hunting for the correct approach to their spreadsheets can be quite frustrating.

The class has great concept but it needs a bit more structure and change to hit its full potential.

The Good:-The spreadsheets and exercises along with Quiz material. The project was also very informative.

The Bad:- The video need to better explain how Area Under Curve and how the Credit model make sense. It was not very intuitive and I struggled for over 2 weeks to put the Project together due to this gap.

But a worthwhile class with great potential. I am glad I took it.

The course is not updated and you have to depend on students solely to get through the material. There are several learning gaps. It would be better if they said that, these topics aren't covered but you need to read up on them. The lecturer style of delivery is not engaging so it is a challenge to get through the videos. The content and concept, that is the ability to determine a model using Excel is cool.

Course contents are rather deep which is good and makes it challenging. Explanations could be better and there should be more content on some topics for better understanding. Someone with background in statistics would find this course more useful than on who only has basic knowledge of statistics. Nevertheless, it inspired me to learn from other sources to fill the gaps in my understanding.

Leve of difficulty was above my expectations. Moved too fast. Could have been more thorough in applying the content to examples similar to the quiz. Seemed to stick to the bare minimum of what would be required before moving to the quiz. Be transparent with future prospective students that this course absolutely requires knowledge of calculus, probability, and statistics.

The course has some valuable information, however course materials and videos are not so helpful. If you already have some knowledge about statistics and excel, it will be a lot easier to follow the instructor's lectures, otherwise I don't feel how a beginner could really follow up on this course. Some topics are run through so quickly that they are confusing to students.

This quickly became a statistics course, which although important was really difficult for me as I went in not expecting it.

However, Dr. Egger is incredible! I think he's a fantastic and well-versed instructor in the Data & Analytics realm and am eager to find ways I can use what I've learned into practice at work.

I would like to have more example, it feels there is mostly theory. The quizzes were super easy, I dropped out at final project, I couldn't get through the first questions. The course (and especially the final project) requires a good basis in statistics beforehand.

The assistants are super helpful and patient.

The instructor should spend more time putting equations and concepts into concept, and tying them together. It often felt like values and questions were arbitrary. This is less about master data analysis in Excel, and more about gaining ground in a few key concepts, so the title is misleading as well.

The quality of the content did not meet my expectations. There were typos, incorrect answers, and vague explanations. Courses like these, which are fully online and do not have any sort of support besides the forum, really need to make sure everything is robust in terms of content and quality.

Difficult and too condensed for a beginners course. Although I appreciate that some of the worksheets were put together for us, I can't understand the underlying concept as well as if I were the one putting everything together. Logistically, it's not appropriate for a class this short.

I definitely learned a lot from this course, however, the teaching was very poor. The teacher is very hard to understand and much of my learnings I was forced to find elsewhere. Questions in the quizzes are not in coherence with the classes and one is often left very confused.

Even though the course can be considered as very complete, useful and challenging at the same time, the challenge was partly generated by the unclear instructions for the course, the tests and the assignments. It was quite difficult to follow (thank God to the forum!).

nice syllabus overall with great exercises.

wish it would teach more commonly used excel skills in business e.g. pivot tables, index-match, vlookup etc.

lectures were a bit hard to follow (esp the mathy ones) - i'd suggest reworking the blackboard craft

Great course and an amazing professor; however, Week 4 and beyond should be redesigned. Linear regression is not that challenging of a topic, if taught well, and based on the discussion forums, too many people got lost at that point in the course.

Too much mathematics. People who want to get deep into the working out analysis should do this course. If you want to learn basic analysis then its better you do some other course as this is heavy on theory and the quizzes are very tough.

This course did not live up to its potential.

The course should be retitled as an "Intro to Statistics" not learning functions and visualizations on excel.

I still have three stars because I at least picked up some useful concepts from it.

Great class, however I felt it was very heavy on statistics and math concepts versus how to use Excel for data analysis. I would've liked to see some strategies on how to analyze large datasets, look for trends, and clean up bad data.

The course was challenging and I learnt a lot. Some more practical exercises would have been helpful for me. Now everything came together in the peer graded assignment, where I missed some professional feedback to learn from.

The attendants might already have a good foundation of econometric and probability statistics before taking this course. Some definitions might be difficult to understand especially how it would be applied in real life.

A very challenging course with a lot of very heavy maths at times. I found Daniel very engaging and he is obviously very passionate about his field. However, some of the instructions were ambiguous or unclear at times.

so many materials need to read, feel loss patience. but in general, the course is useful. hope can reduce part of the material, no one can stand after 5 or 10 min's video, another 5 or 10 mins reading come along with.