great

Great!

Great!

useful

great

nice

Best

good

Nice

Good

ccol

good

Nice

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This was a good course for anyone looking to learn advanced excel analytics techniques. I learned a lot and the quizzes and final project give sufficient hands on practice to go along with the videos.

The reason I am not giving this course 5 stars is because there were times when the instructor rushes through some of the concepts in the course. I had a hard time following along at times and had to do a lot of reading in the forums to understand how to complete the final project. I would not rate this as a beginner course, these are advanced data analytics techniques requiring using calculus and statistics in excel. There are also some errors in the quizzes and I found that the course mentors are not super active in the forums -- many of their posts and tips being from 3-4 years ago.

All that said, I don't want my review to deter folks from taking this course. I learned a lot and I feel very accomplished that I completed it and I am walking away with a thorough understanding of the topics. I'd still recommend this course to anyone who is willing to put in extra hours outside of the course to do your own research, spend time with the spreadsheets, and use the forums.

This course is very useful for learning about statistics and data science at a very surface level. However if you're looking to learn more about how to use Excel itself like pivot tables and Vlookups, this course unfortunately doesn't teach you all that much. That being said, I still found this course to be quite valuable if you're able to power through.

Cons:

This course is old; it is very old. This course is like 7 years old in that I think this came out in like 2017. The course structure is very messy in that a lot of spreadsheets that you actually need to use for the final project don't always correspond to the spreadsheet they suggest you use. You also often have to read the discussions or go to the course resource page to figure out how to actually use the spreadsheets. Worse yet, the course hasn't even been updated in a while and the questions on the weekly quizzes reflect that.

The difficulty spike can seem ridiculous at times. You can see it early on when you jump from week 1 to week 2 and on part 1 of the final project. Because of this, this course may take a while longer than the course estimates.

This course was a rigorous introduction to using Excel for the specific purpose of solving data analytics problems. The challenges were fun and rewarding for those who love mathematics, applications to real-world data problems, and who are comfortable with wrestling with complex concepts independently. The core components of this course were binary classifications, linear regression, and the supporting mathematical and statistical theorems. While the first two weeks of the course were a very steep learning curve (even for a student with a B.A. in Applied Mathematics), the supplemental explanations after submitting assignments helped the learning process. I wished such structure and explanatory post-quiz materials persisted through weeks 3-6 of the course. This would have made it more rewarding, as I came away wishing I could review my weaker areas.

After completing the course, I'd like to say that the title of the course seems quite misleading as it focuses very much on math and statistical concepts behind some of the commonly used techniques and not so much on using excel to perform data analysis. It's interesting to know the concepts behind, but I have to admit that I struggled with the course as I've not touched advanced maths and statistics since college almost 2 decades ago.

From the peer review assignment, it appears that I'm not the only one struggling with the course. One suggestion to Duke University would be to set up screening of the peer review assignments and single out those that have exceptionally short responses, out of 5 that I reviewed, 2 submissions have only (.) in its response. That surely shouldn't be allowed

Entering this course with a pretty in-depth knowledge of Excel, it was good to be able to brush up on some things I don't use on a day-to-day basis such as VLOOKUP and STANDARDIZE functions. The subject material is quite good, AOC and Binary Classifications were very interesting to learn about and have tons of applications, particularly in operation optimization problems/cases. One point of suggestion would be to double-check and clean up the accompanying Excel files. Some of the material was confusing to follow along with. If you could define cells, arrays, and tables for instance it would make the material much more intuitive to follow-along with.