Resource Center
===============

Here are links to a variety of business analytics and Excel related resources.

General business analytics
------------------------------------------------

* `Analytics Magazine`_ It's published by `INFORMS - the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science <https://www.informs.org/>`_. They are the premier professional society for analytics and it's inexpensive to join as a student. Full disclosure, I've been an INFORMS member since about 1986 (when it was still ORSA/TIMS). We were doing analytics before it was called analytics. :)
* `Competing on Analytics`_ - This is the Harvard Business Review article that brought analytics to the forefront in business (even though it had been around for decades). The article led to a book of the same name that was a best seller in the business world.

Excel resources
-----------------

Tons of Excel resources exist on the web. Here are a few.

Blogs and metasites
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

* `ExcelIsFun`_ - Huge You Tube channel of Excel how-to videos
* `ExcelJet <https://exceljet.net/>`_ - Excel learning resources (some free, some not)
* `Excel Help, Resources and Tutorials`_ - Good collection of organized links including a list of Best Books for Learning Excel. Found out about this one in the Excel Developers LinkedIn group.
* `Daily Dose of Excel`_ - blog posts by various Excel folks
* `Peltier Tech Blog`_ - longtime Excel blogger
* `Top 69 Blogs in the World for Learning Excel`_ - nice list with good descriptions

Excel modeling and analysis
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

* `Albright, Winston Textbooks`_ - I'm a longtime user of several of these guys textbooks. This page contains numerous files related to their books. Great stuff - also check out the `Free Downloads page <https://host.kelley.iu.edu/albrightbooks/Free_downloads.htm>`_. 
* `ModelOff`_ - Financial modeling world championships. Must see to believe. But..., things have changed. Even though this link now leads to a commercial set of learning resources, I'm leaving it here because it's an interesting statement on the evolution of modeling in the finance world. You can find some of the `classic ModelOff competitions on YouTube <https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=modeloff+financial+modeling+world+championships>`_.

Publicly available data
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

* `DrivenData Competitions <https://www.drivendata.org/competitions/>`_ - not suggesting you compete (you can) but these are a great source of high quality datasets. You'll need to create a free account to be able to download data. I used this site as a motivation for my series of blog posts on `algal bloom detection from satellite imagery <https://bitsofanalytics.org/posts/algaebloom-part1/>`_.
* `Kaggle Datasets <https://www.kaggle.com/datasets>`_ - need to create a free Kaggle account
* `Data is Plural <https://www.data-is-plural.com/>`_ - links to many interesting datasets
* `Data.gov <https://data.gov/>`_ - US government data
* `Census.gov <https://www.census.gov/>`_ - US census data
* `Bureau of Transportation Statistics <https://www.transtats.bts.gov/Homepage.asp>`_ - tons of transportation rel
* `OpenML Datasets <https://www.openml.org/search?type=data&sort=runs&status=active>`_ - site with many ML resources
* `UCI Machine Learning Repository <https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets.html>`_
* `cs109 Resources (2014) <http://cs109.github.io/2014/pages/resources.html>`_ - Many links to datasets (as well as links to Python and misc data science stuff)
* `https://github.com/rstudio/RStartHere#data <https://github.com/rstudio/RStartHere#data>`_ - From the RStartHere site
* `Google Public Data <https://www.google.com/publicdata/directory>`_
* `Climate Data Online <http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/>`_
* `USGS <https://www.usgs.gov/>`_
* `dataportals.org <http://dataportals.org/>`_
* `Finding Data on the Internet (from Inside-R) <http://www.inside-r.org/howto/finding-data-internet>`_
* `Modern plain text computing <https://mptc.io/content/>`_ - this course has a list of practice data sources on the main page (check out tidy Tuesday)

Communities
^^^^^^^^^^^^^

* `StackOverflow Excel tags`_ - excel, excel-vba, excel-formulas, more...
* `Mr. Excel`_ - Community message board, blog, consulting services and more

Online Excel courses
--------------------

I haven't taken any of these.

* `Coursera`_ - tagged "excel"
* `EdX`_ - tagged "excel, data analysis, statistics"
* `Udemy`_ - tagged "excel"
* `Chandoo.org`_ - well known online Excel training


.. _Top 69 Blogs in the World for Learning Excel: http://spreadsheeto.com/best-excel-blogs/ 
.. _ExcelIsFun: https://www.youtube.com/user/ExcelIsFun
.. _Excel Help, Resources and Tutorials: https://excel.tv/excel-resources/
.. _Mr. Excel: http://mrexcel.com/
.. _Daily Dose of Excel: http://dailydoseofexcel.com/
.. _Peltier Tech Blog: https://peltiertech.com/blog/
.. _StackOverflow Excel tags: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/excel
.. _Excel Hero Blog: http://www.excelhero.com/blog/
.. _Albright, Winston Textbooks: https://kelley.iu.edu/albrightbooks/
.. _ModelOff: https://www.modeloff.com/
.. _Open access version of my spreadsheet modeling class (2013): http://hselab.org/moodle/course/view.php?id=2
.. _Coursera: https://www.coursera.org/courses?languages=en&query=excel
.. _EdX: https://www.edx.org/course/?search_query=excel&language=English&subject=Data%20Analysis%20%26%20Statistics
.. _Udemy: https://www.udemy.com/courses/search/?src=ukw&q=excel
.. _Chandoo.org: http://chandoo.org/


.. _Analytics Magazine: http://analytics-magazine.org/
.. _Competing on Analytics: https://hbr.org/2006/01/competing-on-analytics