Learn Foundational Data Analytics Skills with MS Excel
Millions of users around the world still use Microsoft Excel as a sophisticated spreadsheet, to perform various accounting functions and to contain lists of useful business items. However, Excel is also a great tool to use when you’re looking to learn basic Data Analytics skills, and for this purpose it’s still just as effective as most other beginning-level tools. To learn Data Analytics through a formal instructor, you can contact Learn Data Analytics (LDA), where classes are available on weekdays, weekends, and evenings. These classes are offered multiple times throughout the year, so all you have to do is pick a session that works for you, and begin learning at your own speed.
Why use Excel for Data Analytics?
First of all, Excel has proven itself to be one of the most reliable and stable platforms in computing, and it has a 30-year track record of solving business problems in the most streamlined and effective manner. As a foundational tool for intelligent data, it will help to broaden your understanding of how Analytics works. A great many businesses and companies continue to favor Excel because it can easily provide a whole slew of actionable insights into data. Using Excel, you can identify business patterns and trends, operations tendences, marketing trends and opportunities, and even more.
To see how Excel can be an excellent tool for Analytics, consider just what it is that Excel does so well. It stores single pieces of data in each of its cells, and information like units sold, stock-keeping units, sales dates, or exports can be entered into these cells so they can be viewed more easily and to organize them. Once this data has been entered or imported into Microsoft Excel, it can be viewed much more easily so that actionable insights can be gleaned from the data. If you’re dealing with more complex data, you can setup customized fields and functions that perform time-saving calculations for you, and reduce the amount of work you’d otherwise have to do.
Even if you’re working with huge amounts of data, you’ll be able to view segmented data easily without having to bring in any other software. This will allow you to determine departmental budgets, calculate theoretical profit margins, and do some what-if modeling that can prove useful to your business. What it’s especially great for is performing time-consuming calculations and developing easy-to-see visualizations. Of course, if you’re dealing with an enormous data project, you’ll have to enlist more manpower, more skills, and a finer level of detail, but the fact remains that Excel is still a great place to start.
Data tells the story
The ultimate goal of any data analysis project is to consolidate all data points and to develop an accurate and cohesive narrative about what the data is telling you. This is exactly what Excel does extremely well, and it’s why it’s one of the best tools you can use for familiarizing with Data Analytics. There’s no question that any significant grouping of data is capable of telling a story about business transactions, but not in raw data form. Once you’ve entered your data into Excel and organized it, you should begin to see patterns emerging that provide insights into what has been transacted over a certain time frame.
If you’re already using Excel to capture various kinds of business transactions, you have the raw data and simply need to have it organized before it begins to provide a picture of what’s really happening. For someone who understands business trends, it should be fairly easy to review and analyze this data to identify exactly what kind of story is behind the data. When you have better analysis, you should be able to make better business decisions, and that’s really what Analytics is all about – using rock-solid information to base your future business decisions on.
A company which consistently makes good business decisions is one that is likely to prosper and continue growing. That’s why all companies that hope to succeed in the marketplace should be making extensive use of Data Analytics to guide their decision-making, and it’s why Excel should be at least one of the tools which is used to get you there. If you’d like to take advantage of the formal training available in this area, you should contact Learn Data Analytics today, and arrange to attend classes, either for yourself or for members of your accounting department. Analytics is too important to ignore, so every company should have at least one trained specialist to help guide operations.