Lesson Summary

Welcome to Simple Spreadsheets, led by Ann Emery, where you will learn various Excel skills. Ann shares her journey of learning Excel post-college graduation, emphasizing the importance of practical learning over traditional methods. Her experience led to creating blog posts and YouTube videos, gaining recognition, and conducting workshops globally.

The course focuses on the data analysis process, covering data management, data cleaning, and data tabulation using Excel. Participants will learn how to work with datasets, clean data efficiently, summarize data using formulas and pivot tables, and piece together case studies to apply the learned concepts.

The course features a hybrid format with prerecorded lessons and live office hours for discussions and practical applications. Learners will have access to downloadable Excel files and practice opportunities to enhance their skills. Advanced users can delve into advanced formulas and pivot table applications under Ann's guidance. Join the course to become proficient in Excel for data analysis and visualization!

Transcript

[00:00:00] Welcome to Simple Spreadsheets. I'm Ann Emery, and I am so glad you're here. In this video, you're gonna get a preview of all of the skills that you're gonna learn in the course. But first I'm gonna take you back and share with you some history of how this course came to be.

So I started learning Excel back in 2008 after college graduation. My first conversation with my first boss went something like this. I was like, yay, boss. I am so happy to be starting my first job at your big fancy consulting firm. How do I get SPSS or SaaS installed on my computer? And my boss, very lovingly was like, we don't purchase those licenses here. You'll have to learn Excel.

I had only used SPSS and SaaS in all of my research methods and statistics courses. I had never opened Excel. I mean, maybe I'd seen it a couple times, but I'd never actually typed in it or done any formulas. So [00:01:00] I went to the public library. I kid you not that very first night after work. I drove in the evening rush hour traffic to the library.

I checked out a copy of, it was like an Excel for Dummies book, and I went through page. Page over those first few weeks and months on the job, just trying to teach myself as much as possible, which was really difficult because the vast majority of Excel trainers and authors are accountants and financial modelers, and they had stock market examples and case studies, and I needed to use Excel for something.

Totally different for all of my research and evaluation and policy and data analysis projects. So that's not what I would wish on you. I think it's really hard to learn excel from books, and it's really hard to learn excel from accountants if you're not an accountant. Okay, so that was 2008, getting my feet wet Learning ex.

By 2010, I had learned a lot, so I started blogging to share tips with others, and all of my blog posts were and [00:02:00] are about time savers and quick tips for using everyday software like Excel, better and faster. By 2012, I started YouTubing because I didn't want people to just. Read about Excel. I thought that was really hard to just learn from screenshots.

I wanted them to see my mouse moving around on the screen. So the videos made a lot of sense, and by 2014, word had spread thanks to my blog and thanks to my YouTube channel that I knew about Excel. And I started getting invitations to do workshops all around the US and the world. This was one of my first paid workshops.

It was for policy analysts. In Uganda, and I think I was there, I think it was a three day workshop with some more like keynote talks. So it was pretty in depth. It was very broad, very deep learning all about Excel for data analysis and data visualization. I. By the end of 2014, the demand had gone up so much for workshops and conference keynotes [00:03:00] that I was able to leave the salaried world and start my own company full-time.

I'd also in there been, um, doing grad school, doing my master's degree at night. After work I was super busy, but by the time I graduated my master's degree in 2014, I was able to really focus on my own company full-time. By 2018, I added online courses like this one. I've done a variety of formats over the years.

I've done fully prerecorded and asynchronous. I've done fully live nowadays. I mostly do a hybrid that's like this course where you're gonna watch the lessons. Prerecorded asynchronously. Anytime you want that fits around your own schedule. And then you'll join me for live office hours so that we can talk about what you're learning and you can think about how to apply it to your own projects.

Okay? What we're gonna learn is the data analysis process. Data analysis means different things to different people. I use it as a verb to [00:04:00] talk about this process, and it's a process of. Doing, typing inside a software program like Excel in this course. But it's also a process about thinking, asking yourself questions, seeing where there might be problems in the data or weird typos or weird outliers, and then thinking about what you're gonna do with it.

So we're gonna go through this whole process. First, you're gonna learn all about data management. So there are modules and lessons and spreadsheets about the data sets we receive, the data sets we create from scratch and data sets. We have to merge and piece together from a variety of different sources.

Then you'll learn all about data cleaning. You'll learn about duplicates, missing data counts, pulling variables apart, pushing them back together, formatting tips and recoding. That's gonna be a biggie [00:05:00] in that segment. And then finally, there are modules, lessons, and Excel files about data tabulation summarizing the numbers with formulas.

Summarizing the categories with formulas and then using pivot tables. Beginners, you're gonna love pivot tables and advanced users. I encourage you to practice all of those formulas along with me. The super advanced people are gonna know when to use each one formulas and or pivot tables, which I'm gonna be giving you all the insider knowledge about that too as we go.

There are tons of Excel files to download, so you can practice along with me. The answer key is on the left, and then where I'm gonna be demoing, and you're gonna be typing is gonna be on the right. For example, there's a whole segment about text to columns. There's another whole segment about concatenation.

There are gonna be multiple examples of each of these, so you can practice with different formats and different scenarios. And at the [00:06:00] end of course there are multiple case studies where we're gonna take all these building blocks and put 'em all together from start to finish so that you know exactly what to do when you get a raw data set.

How exactly do you think about data management, data cleaning and data tabulation going through that analytical process? Alright, that's it for now. I will see you in the very next lesson.