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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Introduction to Spreadsheets and Models by University of Pennsylvania

4.2
stars
3,752 ratings

About the Course

The simple spreadsheet is one of the most powerful data analysis tools that exists, and it’s available to almost anyone. Major corporations and small businesses alike use spreadsheet models to determine where key measures of their success are now, and where they are likely to be in the future. But in order to get the most out of a spreadsheet, you have the know-how to use it. This course is designed to give you an introduction to basic spreadsheet tools and formulas so that you can begin harness the power of spreadsheets to map the data you have now and to predict the data you may have in the future. Through short, easy-to-follow demonstrations, you’ll learn how to use Excel or Sheets so that you can begin to build models and decision trees in future courses in this Specialization. Basic familiarity with, and access to, Excel or Sheets is required....

Top reviews

MM

Jun 21, 2017

This course has made me understand cost accounting, has provided a fresh perspective on how to solve some of the challenges i had with management accounting and as a bonus, made me love maths again :)

RJ

Jun 11, 2020

The course is worth the time , the faculty teaches you about some complicated advance formulae with so much clarity and ease that even beginners can be pro in excel related to business and finance.

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401 - 425 of 703 Reviews for Introduction to Spreadsheets and Models

By Deleted A

•

Mar 29, 2020

Very Helpful

By Hang L

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Dec 30, 2021

very useful

By IBRAHIM D A

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Mar 6, 2022

very good

By Blake E

•

May 5, 2020

Decent

By Lucas V M

•

May 31, 2016

Great!

By Oscar P S R

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Feb 18, 2021

good!

By Justin O

•

Jul 27, 2021

Okay

By Kiran G G

•

Apr 19, 2020

Good

By Tom K

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Jun 23, 2017

V

By Chintamani D

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Apr 11, 2021

This had the potential my to be so much better but instead it was made a complete waste of time. Its ridiculous how the professor thought that the manner in which the concepts were explained would be understandable. I had no excel experience and all of it was totally new to me. Before enrolling I thought there would be clear and step by step explanation of the concept for new users to understand but instead they just assumed that we already knew what was being taught and we would understand the whole thing in a matter of a few minutes. The quiz had some issues.

This is one of those courses that I came across on Coursera that does not show you the answers if you get them wrong. Now it makes sense to not reveal the answer but what would be better is to show how the answer was reached at but in the next attempt provide a different question. Coursera hopefully looks into this and does the needful. Otherwise if you get stuck, there's no way of knowing how to solve the question.

By Jason P

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Aug 6, 2017

I'm not entirely sure that this course should have been separated out on its own. The material was too high level with very minimal examples/practice questions. It made it kind of difficult to tease out what was important in a 3-5 minute videos. I felt like it left you stretching to match the objectives with the content. In regards to the quiz questions, I think it'd be useful to see the correct answer when it comes to formulas. This would be important because an answer may actually be correct but marked incorrect due to the fact it wasn't typed exactly as the specified answer was. For example, $F$8 <= $H$8 could be construed differently than $F$8 < = $H$8. Again, I'm not saying that this was the case, but it does happen frequently in these types of quiz formats.

By Alan H

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Apr 20, 2020

This course was well-organized and I appreciate the no-nonsense, fast pacing. I was introduced to several functions and tools I was not familiar with and think I benefited from the course overall. However, the quizzes are terrible. I found the questions to be either 1) extremely trivial or 2) ambiguous in wording of the question or in the answer choices provided. As a result and as someone else noted in a review of this course, you can't learn anything from the quiz feedback. For some of the questions in which I erred, I'm still scratching my head as to why I got it wrong in the first place, or why my subsequent answers upon retaking the quiz were right.

By Jorge E G H

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Feb 21, 2018

The professor seems to have a good amount of knowledge about the topic, but the course does not provide a lot of information regarding basic functions and the examples given are not enough; the content lacks of exercises to apply what we learned. The lessons are well explained, and overall the information is good, but as I mentioned before, it would be better to make the course more dynamic and provide exercises to complete. Also it would be better to explain in depth the tools individually because what they teach you is excessively general, so you can't actually see a proper application in real life.

By Tatsiana M

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May 10, 2018

Although I learned some new material, the course was very disappointing. I am not sure what had happened with the second chapter. It appears, based on introduction , we should have learned many new things in each video. However, after the introduction the video was over. Next two chapters had some useful material but again, I wish it would be explained in a greater detail.

I give this course three stars but only because of the respect I have to all professors. I fill like this course was a teaser for people to go to the Wharton University.

By Michael S

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Mar 18, 2016

A separate class for spreadsheets and modeling isn't bad perse. The best way to teach these models is to integrate them during finance or accounting, or whatever specific class you are trying to learn.

That said this is probably a good resource for someone with 0 and I mean absolutely NO experience with excel. However my gut feeling also tells me that those who have had 0 experience with excel will not be able to follow the models shown in this class.

By Nathan M

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May 24, 2019

I seemed to have trouble with Quiz questions requiring input of formulas. I was 3 for 3, missing each one, although I proved each one was functionally correct. Could be just subjectivity as there are many ways to write a formula. Also could be that I was not writing my formulas according to some standard or best practice. Other comment: additional worked examples would be nice to test and practice on as the complexity of steps builds.

By Marko Ž

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Jul 16, 2019

Highly interesting subject and useful additional learning material at the end of the weekly lectures. Questions on a quizzes can be really challenging, but unfortunately the lectures are really oversimplified and at some points I felt like I'm studying on some trial/free version of a bigger course. This also reflected in a quiz part of a course, where sometimes it was hard to find an appropriate answer to some of the questions.

By Ashley S

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Sep 12, 2021

The quiz and the lecture is not really corresponding to each other, I always needed to do extra google search or check the discussion forum to get the whole idea what the questions are really asking. I believe the professor is professional and I saw an inspiring explanation from him in the discussions for a specific quiz question. But the learning process that I experienced is really not nice, the course is not well designed.

By Matt C

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Apr 24, 2016

The lecturer was very slow, and some things were not explained very well (while very simple concepts were often over-explained).

Also, I'm quite sure there were at least 2 errors in the weekly quizzes. One that comes to mind is a question that had identical options for two of the multiple-choice answers, but only one of them was correct (50/50 guess, more or less --- I had to take the quiz 3 times before I guessed right!).

By Victoria C

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May 27, 2017

Modules 3 and 4 were satisfactory, but really does not make up for how ill-thought out the first two were. Questions on quizzes were confusing and you could not correct yourself because you couldn't get the correct answer.

The course would be much better if the answers came from interacting with the data sets given as examples, or if there was a 'quiz' data set that you had to actually perform the functions on.

By Anna D

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Feb 27, 2017

There were some useful examples in this course. But overall this course and the entire specialisation rely too heavily on Excel which seems a bit outdated when data sets are so much bigger these days (than the ones in this course). Based on the requirements of companies hiring data and business analysts the expectation for anybody who wants to work in this field is in at least one or more programming languages.

By Tania G U D

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May 21, 2020

The explanations on videos are not as precise as I needed. And so far it has been the course with less content I have took in Coursera. I think, videos can be done again to be more agile and introduce information missed. Also, the test were not so clear. I got good grades but answers were ambiguos. I think you need to structure questions in order to know what you expect as an only answer.

By Karen S

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Oct 27, 2019

The lectures were quite good and I learned a lot. However, I found it difficult to understand sometimes what was wanted from in the quizzes and I ended up taking them several times in order to pass. I would recommend that providers examine the google support certificate model of using labs to practice and learn with smaller quizzes interspersed, even within the lectures themselves.

By Vidhya K

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Mar 23, 2016

This course needs tremendous improvement. In contrast to previous fundamentals of quantitative modelling module, this lags in lot of areas. No clear explanations and the quizzes are worded super vague and filled with with bugs. I expected a lot under Monte Carlo Simulation. However, too simplistic example and explanation was presented. The topics were not introduced clearly.

By Gretchen R

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Oct 25, 2020

Concur with many of the forum comments. There could be more extensive course materials in the actual lectures to reduce the amount of self study and information scouring around the quiz. Fill-in-the-blank format for the quiz is rather problematic and perhaps overly challenging for this platform. But I did appreciate the introduction to modelling specific functions in Excel.