Introduction to Excel Analytics for Business Decision-Making
Video Transcript
Pete: Hi, I'm Pete Hohenhaus. I'm the instructor for Introduction to Excel Analytics for Business decision making.
What is this course?
Well, it's basically a course that's designed to have you think about data and how data can be transformed into information through organization. Things like graphs and charts. Well, the tool that modifies data into information is Excel.
Is Excel a creative tool?
Excel is creative in the sense that it allows you to organize information, not just your business information, but your personal information or other information in ways that make it more usable and more accessible, not just to you, but to other people.
This sounds a little scary …
So, I know that whenever people see courses about Excel, they may think to themselves, nah, this sounds a little scary, I'm a little concerned about it. Well, first of all, just to let you know, I'm in the course with you. Anytime you need me, I'm accessible. For example, we have not only little videos for each week, but we have instructor presentation notes where I document all the steps you need to take to do the various calculations and the various techniques within Excel.
Is this just number crunching?
So when we talk about Excel, a lot of people think of Excel as being sort of a number-crunching tool. But it really is creative because you can organize lots of data that's not numbers in Excel, or you can organize numbers in Excel and use graphs and charts to be creative. There's nothing so creative as showing somebody a picture of what the revenues, costs, expenses, or units look like over time in a graph or a chart.
Am I really going to learn anything about my business?
So when you use Excel for analytics, some of the things you may discover that you would not ordinarily see is you may notice trends or you may notice outliers in your data. Let's say you have sales figures that keep on going up, more or less, pretty steadily through three or four years in a row, but then you see a spike up or a spike down in your data or in the graphs of your data that will tell you something about your business that you wanna investigate. It could be a good thing or it could be a bad thing, but you wanna look at it.
Anything else?
I'm really excited to be able to talk to you about the course and to welcome you into the course and to tell you that I think you'll find it to be very rewarding, very interesting and we'll give you some tools that you might not otherwise have had.
Introduction to Excel Analytics for Business Decision-Making is part of the Applied Business Certificate.
