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

4.2
stars
3,909 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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651 - 675 of 934 Reviews for Mastering Data Analysis in Excel

By Darryl B

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Oct 22, 2020

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.

By Mohit M

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Jan 4, 2016

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.

By Grant V

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Apr 4, 2017

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.

By Thao V

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Nov 16, 2015

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.

By Ambreen H

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Mar 23, 2016

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.

By Marta M

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Feb 2, 2016

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.

By Chris C

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Aug 15, 2016

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.

By Allen O

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Jun 30, 2020

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.

By Sam H

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Aug 21, 2017

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.

By Nicholas J S

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Nov 29, 2019

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.

By Anna K

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Dec 10, 2020

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!).

By Malcolm N

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Sep 20, 2016

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

By Marcus H

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Oct 15, 2020

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.

By Pratyush A

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Aug 25, 2020

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.

By Ali H A

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Feb 14, 2016

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.

By Cynthia N

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Feb 7, 2016

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.

By Lieselot D

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Jul 17, 2018

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.

By Bích L N

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Mar 10, 2016

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.

By Edward J

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Oct 15, 2020

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.

By Hazel H

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Dec 29, 2017

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.

By Yuting W

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Aug 5, 2018

The tool and the video don't relate very tight.The tool costs me a lot of time.By the way ,for the Quiz 4, I totally can't get the results for the quiz.I found someone in the discussion met the same problem.

By Felipe B

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Feb 1, 2021

Content in ok, but the format of the class it's screaming for a redo. This is not an easy topic, and the lectures are a little hard to follow. I learned more doing the final assignment and googling a lot.

By AASHISH P

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Dec 5, 2020

This course very useful for people who are looking to make a career in Data analysis. It is quite difficult to understand the course for beginners as the teaching could have been in more easy language.

By Skyler M

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Aug 4, 2016

This course is very challenging. I may not have had the proper background in mathematics to full absorb the material. Similarly I may have to busy of a lifestyle to have properly focused on this class.

By John E P

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Aug 9, 2018

This course was very informative, but in my opinion it has a very steep learning curve. The course takes some very steep jumps from basic concepts to building binary models with out a lot or guidance.