Data wrangling and visualization

• Organizing your data
• Some power Excel techniques
• Data cleaning
• Intro to data visualization
• Multidimensional data exploration and visualization
• Dashboards

Now that we’ve built a foundation of basic modeling principles, we’ll spend a couple of weeks starting to dig into data focused techniques. Specifically, we’ll learn about principles of data organization and graphical excellence and make sure you know how to use basic Excel techniques such as data filtering, pivot tables, and creating histograms. We’ll learn about relational and multidimensional databases and learn a few more power Excel techniques that will come in handy throughout the course including creating worksheet controls, advanced conditional formatting, and the mysterious and magical world of array formulas. We’ll also learn about the very important, and long neglected, topic of data cleaning and preparation, a.k.a “data wrangling”.

Textbook Readings

• Business Analytics: Chapter 2 - Describing the Distribution of a Single Variable

• Business Analytics: Chapter 3 - Finding Relationships Among Variables

• Business Analytics: Chapter 4 - Business Intelligence (BI) Tools for Data Analysis

Both Ch 2 and 3 are chock full of good stuff for using Excel to start exploring data. Hopefully some of it is review for you but I’m sure there is much new stuff for most of you.

In the 7th edition of our BA textbook, the authors made some nice updates by moving some existing material as well as creating new material for Chapter 4 - Business Intelligence (BI) Tools for Data Analysis. This chapter now covers things like:

• Importing data using Power Query (used to be in Ch 18 of 6th edition)

• Data analysis with Power Pivot (used to be in Ch 17 of 6th edition)

• data visualization with Tableau Public (new)

• data cleansing (new)