Skills Enhancement on Data Analysis Techniques

Course Overview:

To maximize opportunities from data, organizations must employ data analysis techniques and make the business case for a data analysis strategy that can help overcome the following challenges. ERPs and databases have evolved to a point where they can house amazingly large amounts of data. The question now is, what do you do with this data to add value? This program will introduce Business Intelligence (BI), hands-on, to allow you to clean, normalize, and interpret large volumes of data. You will be able to establish historical relationships, analyze the current situation and predict future strategies. The application of BI is borderless, covering operational, tactical, and strategic business decisions. It spans all departments and cascades down to all users who perform data cleansing, reporting, analysis, modelling, integration, and automation.

In this course, we use MS Excel exclusively as an ultimate and readily available BI tool allowing you to develop an exclusive level of expertise and add immediate value to your job and company

Course Objectives:

At the end of this course, the participants will be able to:

• Boost Excel Business Intelligence (BI) expertise in data slicing and dicing, data massaging, and data aggregation and modelling
• Perform data normalization, consolidation, report writing, analysis and reconciliation
• Develop dynamic BI models, dashboards, scorecards, and flash management reports by linking-up Excel with Access, Web, Text, Internet, SQL, ERPs and other databases
• Advance and enhance the look and feel of reports using dynamic visualization techniques
• Acquire numerous tips and tricks that enable them to work efficiently

Course Coverage:

Topic 1: Data Analysis Tools and Techniques:

• Consolidating data from separate files and sheets
• Advanced data validation using lists, dates and custom validation
• Powerful array functions
• Cell management tools: left, right, mid, concatenate, value
• Naming, editing, and managing cells and ranges
• Subtotal, sumif, sumifs, sumproduct, count, countif, countifs
• Looking-up data, texts, and values using vlookup
• The incredible table-tools technique
• Slicing dates into day names, weeks, week numbers, month names, years and quarters
• Text-to-columns and dynamic trimming using trim and lens
• Managing texts and numbers using replace, find, and substitute
• Text change functions

Topic 2: Mastering Data Reporting

• The 20 must-learn pivot-tables tools
• Creating pivot tables
• Number formatting techniques
• Designing report layout
• Sorting in ascending, descending and more sort options
• Filtering labels and values
• Expanding and collapsing reports
• Drill down option
• Summarize values by sum, average, minimum, maximum, and count
• Show values as % of total and % of
• Pivot table options
• Inserting formulas
• Data analysis
• Copying pivot tables
• Creating pivot charts
• Dynamic chart labelling
• Mastering the slicer
• Showing report filter pages
• Linking pivot tables and pivot graphs with PowerPoint
• Conditional formatting with pivot tables
• Designing reports using the get pivot data

Topic 3: Data Modeling and Integration:

• Spinner
• Checkbox data modelling with if function
• Option button data modelling with if function
• List box data modelling with choose function
• Scenario manager
• Linking Excel with text files
• Linking Excel with databases (Access)
• Linking Excel with SQL
• Linking Excel with Internet
• Linking Excel with Excel

Topic 4: The Look and Feel:

• Charting and visualization techniques
• Using the camera tool
• Working with formula-driven visualizations
• Using fancy fonts
• Leveraging symbols in formulas
• Working with sparklines
• Creating unconventional style charts

Topic 5: Tips and Tricks:

• Controlling and protecting your reports, worksheets and workbooks
• Data entry form
• Custom list
• Text-to-speech
• Advanced conditional formatting
• Shortcuts for your daily work

Targeted Groups:

• Business Professionals
• Business Analysts
• Data Analysts
• Research Analysts
• Finance Professionals
• Marketing and Sales Professionals
• HR Professionals
• IT Professionals
• Administrative Staff
• Supervisors, General Business Professionals and Staff from any function who need to learn and apply state-of-the-art data analysis techniques to their daily business reporting and decision making