This course is about giving you the tools you need to use data to gain actionable business insight. Nearly everywhere we go and everything we do, from shopping online to typing a text, is infused with and enhanced by big data, machine learning and data analytics. To win a business and to even be a successful participant, you and I need to learn how to master tools that help us take data and turn it into usable business insights. >> This course will give you four necessary and cutting edge tools to put you into the game. These tools are, one, your mind and how you process and think about data and data analytics. Two, power BI, a popular low coating business intelligence tool that is part of the core of Microsoft's business analytics tools. Three, R and RStudio, a popular coding language and code development environment that is relatively easy to use and was created to do analytics and statistical analyses. And four, Alteryx, another popular low coating business analytics and intelligence tool that focuses on automation and replicability. In each module, we will use one of these tools to focus on the first half of the data analytics workflow. The data analytics workflow consists of the following parts, one, acquiring and maintaining data. Two, getting data ready for analysis. We often call this ETL, for extracting, transforming and loading data. Three, data exploration including the steps we take to understand and view our data. We often call this exploratory data analysis or EDA. Four, data modeling, including predicting future outcomes and inferring relationships from our data to other data and situations. Five, creating analysis, results and business insights. And six, visualizing and communicating findings and solutions. >> In particular, in this course will focus on steps two and three, and will use each tool in succession to learn and practice those steps. For example, imagine you've acquired some data and you want to view and explore it. The data is in some format, so you want to get it into your tool and clean it up, so that it's viewable and has as few mistakes and errors as possible. Then you want to explore it, so that you can start to see what stories it can tell, and how it can be useful to you in solving your business problems and creating business opportunities. >> Pictures are truly worth 1000 words. So, you will inevitably want to create some visualizations to help you and others interact with and understand the data. Our goal in this course is to provide you with a solid framework and foundation for how to understand and pursue business analytics. Thus in the future when you encounter a data analysis task that you have not encountered before, you will be able to slot it into that framework, understand it quickly, and move more rapidly through the process of assimilating the new information that you need to learn. More importantly, you will be able to put your new knowledge to work for you in gaining business insight and solving the business problem. In each module we will use realistic business data to practice using these tools. Thus in each module, we will focus on solving business problems. We are excited for you to expand your toolkit by learning more about these tools. Data cleaning, loading and exploration, are the foundation for all Data Analysis. Opening a new data set and understanding it, is like unlocking a treasure chest and solving a puzzle. It is like peeling an onion and learning layer by layer, it is like opening a Matryoshka doll or nested doll and finding the truth at the center. As you go through these modules, dig in and play with the data. The more you practice, the more you expand your data tool kit and your ability to solve business problems.