I had a lot of issues with this course. The instructor is fine and the quality of her videos is in line with all of the other courses. The course itself is structured very poorly. We went from very easy spreadsheet functions and basic SQL queries to much more advanced SQL stuff in Week 3. Week 3 was significantly harder than anything else. I passed the quiz, but I had no idea what was happening. Really complex queries were being typed out quickly on screen without any serious explanation of what was going on. I had to find other sources to really feel comfortable with JOINs and Subqueries. The Week 4 content was easier, and easily could have preceded the Week 3 stuff.

I find the quizzes are just annoying. There needs to be more questions on these quizzes. When you only have ~8 questions, you will fail if you get more than one question wrong. That might be fine, but there's always at least one question that I think is poorly designed. If you have multiple choice questions, there should be meaningful differences between the correct answer and the distractor options. If three of the options are things that would pass as correct in ordinary conversation, you are literally just splitting hairs over the answer that is technically correct. There is at least one of these really pedantic questions on every quiz. It's downright annoying because you can know the material well enough to explain how to do various things in Excel or SQL and then get these really nitpicky questions wrong. You'll always pass because you can just retake the quiz and do it again, but that wastes valuable time. If I'm going to fail a quiz and have to retake it, it should be because I genuinely don't know something and need a refresher, not because of a few poorly designed questions.

I also think the course fails to tell us very much about data analysis here. Five courses into the sequence and there hasn't been any sort of discussion of statistics apart from using functions to find averages. You don't need to get too heavy into math, but there should be some overviews of how to meaningfully infer things from your data.

The discussion boards are filled with frustrated people who have issues. Many of those posts have been up for months. The course could be so much better if it were just updated a bit. It needs more content. Give us more SQL examples.

2.5 stars This course kind of disappointed me. Up until now, I was able to keep up with all the concepts, but from now I always feel I need to stop and look for external resources to keep up with so much information. I don't feel the material and the exercises provided are enough. The instructor and the exercises took a lot of time repeating basic concepts from spreadsheets (such as Sum, Countif, Max, Min, Conditional Formating, etc), while more complex SQL subjects are briefly mentioned. The instructor seems more worried about spelling the FROM clause, than in explaining what the query means. Oh, and by the 5th course, I guess we all have understood what the * means after SELECT. No need to repeat it all over again. SQL queries became really complex all of a sudden, and Quicklabs are quite useless since they are copy-paste exercises. Plus, it's extremely annoying that some of the documents we are supposed to use are locked when we try to open them. It's manageable because you can download and upload them to Google Drive, but before you understand this trick, you just keep missing information and exercises. This is happening at least in the last 3 courses. I also think that some of the videos and readings were not in the right order (a theme appears briefly in a reading as something you are supposed to know yet, and then, after, you watch a video explaining that as it was the first time).

Bueno aquí voy, primero el certificado es sumamente aburrido, es en extremo laaaargo, facil, pero tiene muuchos errores, a veces te imposibilitan para avanzar y obtener ptje máximo. Me parece que de todos los cursos el único útil fue el de programación en R, quizas el proyecto final y uno de los obsequios por terminar el certificado, por eso le doy dos estrellas, no tiene sentido pagar por un certificado tan básico y tan largo, creo que hay un teoría útil, que se puede explicar en dos semanas no en 15 semanas, ya que es solo formativa, se olvida al poco tiempo, prefiero un curso mucho mas practico y un poquito mas difícil, le tenia mas fe, me siento defraudado por google al lanzar este certificado ,que siendo honesto, lo único útil para empezar a trabajar como analista realmente es el curso de R y Tableau, el cual este ultimo es reeefome y básico, solo trabaja con tableau public, que prácticamente solo se usa para compartir visualizaciones, en la realidad se usa tableau desktop, como mínimo. Espero que en una próxima oportunidad saquen un certificado mas practico enfocado en la resolución de problemas reales y que si va a durar 8 meses que valga la pena y no le metan una teoría inútil como relleno. Creo que este certificado podría haberse terminado en 3 meses como máximo, peero es tan fome y largo que les advierto, preparense para aburrirse durante 20 semanas.

This course introduced a lot of new and challenging concepts such as joining tables, subqueries to aggregate data, creating temporary tables, etc but I wish there would've been more practice examples. The section on nested queries became advanced very quickly, making it hard to grasp the concept and there weren't many guided examples to actually apply the knowledge. Week 3 was particularly challenging for me and when it came time to the discussion prompt that involved applying my learnings to a brand new data set on my own, I really struggled to extract the insights I was looking for from data that was organized differently. I think this course would be very beneficial to students if there are more opportunities to challenge us to apply the concepts by solving problems using own queries. The hands-on activities are good to test out examples, but simply by copying and pasting code is easy. One improvement I can think of is during tests & course challenges, instead of assuming certain SQL calculations & queries were completed, ask the students to write their own queries to answer the business prompt.

Previous courses on this certificate will waste a lot of your time on 5-10 min videos where they repeat over and over how cool data analysis is, why the intructor loves it, how and when it changed their lives, repeat a hundred times the steps to do data analysis, and I could name another 10 (in my opinion) not as important topics that fill the curriculum for the most part, with only little pockets of practical and useful material. When you finally get to the Analysis course where one would expect to learn something more practical and useful, the instructor rushes on a few 5 min videos to show you all the things you can do with SQL using different syntax and functions from what you've been briefly tought before, without any context or explanation on how the query works, all while making it sound easy. It is very confusing, frustrating and demotivating in my opinion. It feels like an important and practical part of the certificate doesn't get the attention and detail it needs to prepare us. I am very disappointed overall with the certificate and will not recommend it.

Disappointed in this course compared to the rest of the certificate. There are several errors in practice quiz and inconsistencies in videos, and the volume also varies a lot between videos. Query formatting/indentation differs from one query to another. Shown example is almost exactly similar to links to w3schools.com. Goes from boring by repeating a lot of content from previous courses, to a lot more difficult within 2 videos for join/subqueries. Difficulty should be gradual to learn correctly, wasn't too much of an issue because I have some experience with SQL, but I didn't like how it was taught. Also, I was quite excited about learning "advanced" functions in spreadsheets, but SUM, AVERAGE, MIN, MAX are definitely not advanced. The most disappointing part, is that I don't feel like I learned much about procedures of analysis, real world examples, common techniques. Instead, it just felt like a continuation of spreadsheet/sql learning, which are tools for analysis, but they are not the analysis process itself.

First of all, Thank you Google to give us this great opportunity. I'm not really feel nice to give this uncomfortable opinion. The previous four courses were very perfect. I was surprised that this fifth course was insufficient in many areas. Evaluation questions and the question explanations are not enough. Too much simple and low level or look like just referred from other references. But lectures were especially insufficient. In particular, it was questionable whether the instructor knew properly in the sub-query, when she gives us explanation, didn't look confident. She just read the query she wrote without explaining why and how it is made in that way. I found and learned the contents on the Internet myself cause it was a little far from great approach. I'm a person who handles Excel skillfully and has already learned HTML before. For others, the fifth course seems to need several improvements. I hope it would be for the others to learn this course later. Thank you very much to spend time to read this.

While there are quite helpful and beneficial concepts and approaches taught in this course, it does not hold up compared to other courses in this certificate. It feels very chaotic and can be difficult to follow at times. It repeats a lot of ideas already covered, does not always follow the "best practices" extensively covered in earlier courses, skips ahead to more advanced concepts without building up to it then scales back to the basics immediately after (jumps straight into advanced sub-queries which leaves you scratching your head then steps back to explain snake_case all over before easing you back into sub-queries). It felt like every video was prompting you to download different files to follow along instead of building on the same datasets and concepts. Some of the hands-on activities are broken (examples don't line up with the step-by-step guides, and occasionally SQL phrases are broken when promoting to copy and paste).

I felt this course was rather a hodgepodge of teaching and not in a good way. On one hand it reviewed very basic spreadsheet info that had been previously covered very thoroughly in earlier courses and yet plowed through quite quickly more advanced SQL queries, terms, and features with barely any explanation. It felt like here's a rather advanced query with multiple subqueries without really breaking the query down or explaining why or when you would use such a query. I didn't feel the course adequately taught or directed you towards methods on how to analyze data. It just gave examples of spreadsheet functions to use and very specific queries to run. I think the course could have done a lot better with a few large problems like stakeholders are looking for these answers. Here's our data. This is one possible way of going through and finding what they are looking for. Here's an alternative way.

I really loved the previous course with Sally, but this one was confusing and not very well thought out at all. I came into this course having already practiced 80% to 90% of the knowledge on spreadsheets and SQL. What I've really struggeled with this course was that examples were given only to show syntax, most of them not even nessecary. Instead of showing a problem, data available, thought process, and application of function, it was instead straight to application of function because this works. I was especially thrown off with the using of GROUP BY directly into an example before any introduction to it at all. Aggregation is supposed to be bee's knees of SQL, but this course was just horiibly messy and terribly executed, by far the worst course so far. I just feel relieved that I've already started learning SQL somewhere else...

I was overall unsatisfied with this course. While I appreciated learning more about SQL, the method in which the lessons were provided didn't provide explanation for how we're supposed to know which functions to use (we're told what to do, but not always given the context for why we're doing specific things). While there's a lot of bloat to all of the courses I've completed thus far, this particular section felt more bloated than the rest. Week 4 had A LOT of content and some of it wasn't even all that necessary.

Also, I disliked how during quizzes and exams I wasn't allowed to actually try doing the SQL stuff on my own. I was given scenarios and told what I did and asked a question about what I did...without actually doing anything. This is a common problem with all facets of the Data Analytics certification from Google.

I really enjoyed this data analyst certificate up until this course. The previous courses of the certificate were clear, concise and explained everything very well. The material for this course felt rushed and 90% of the SQL interactions involved copy and paste, with very little logic needed. Some of the exercises didn't run, and others were so hand-held it felt pointless. The areas of sub-queries and cases was explained in such little detail I needed to look elsewhere to understand the topics, with multiple other people having to do the same. The pacing just felt off compared to the other courses which have been excellent so far, and the following course after this is excellent too.

I just wish this one was up to the same standard, as it is really demotivating to endure this course.

I'm split on this course, on one hand compared to all previous entries in the data analytics course this one was the only one so far that felt like it had real genuine content. On the other hand we'd already briefly learned about almost everything included in this course earlier AND the content was very clumped together. The result was a messy confusing learning experience where half of my brain was saying "we learned this already move on" and the other half was saying "how did we get to here from where we were???". This entire course could really do with a revamp and restructure of its content so that the learning curve feels more gradual rather than being pathetically easy early on with this random difficulty spike.

I'm going to be honest. I think this module was poorly implemented.

There were a number of points made in a short, shallow way that left me frozen. I thought for a while I must be overthinking things, but then after doing more reading I realized the presenter was speeding through areas that weren't at all trivial.

Then, there was the subquery lesson. I'm sorry, but this is teaching for memorization, not understanding. I understand the approach is to give a high level view of what is possible, but this could have been much better without making the videos any lengthier.

I am sure the presenter is competent and I appreciate the time and effort. I hope Google takes these things into consideration for future lessons.

It feels disorganized. At some point it felt like even the instructor was having trouble understanding and explaining the concepts of the course.

Again, even the way she wrote her code was disorganized.

I did not feel like the modules had a sequence and it seems like the information is all jammed.

Courses 1-4 felt great and even though they had different teaching styles, I was able to know what the module was going to be about and they summarized the information really well.

I truly recommend to find external resources, especially to the SQL lessons:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXV3zeQKqGY&t=1409s

The readings were well structured. The infographics and the sources available was what got me through this course.

The instructor was by far one of the worst teachers. She barely explained why she was making the decisions she did. She also didn't explain very well the concepts. That, and there were several times were she needed to be corrected by the people who insert the prompts on the videos. She also kinda assumed we were experts or something, there were times were she did something and then a prompt appeared explaining that she did something one way, however the "right" or proper way to do it is another.

Man, I was so excited to start this course and it was soo bad, at least for me, I don't think I learned so much. At least you guys gave us the SQL intermediate guide to really understand some concepts.

I am a beginner with this material but have experience with data analysis at work. I am half way through now and I am noticing the technical aspect is lacking the more I am into the course: what I am shown on the screen for a query input into BigQuery does not work in BigQuery. The teaching is alright, but lacks guidance, especially in the SQL material. I suggest gaining some SQL knowledge before attempting, as it will make it a little smoother. Other than that, it is alright. I want to find another Data Analyst course and compare the materials and approaches. That's where I am now. Would I want my money back if I had the chance and invest it into the other course? Probably.

This was supposed to be the main course of the program, since it is about analyzing data, so I was expecting a lot from it and I was really excited about it. Alas, I felt miserable during the most part of the course because the instructor was not good at explaining concepts, gave us messy and confusing examples, and she didn't even seem to follow best practices herself. I felt so frustrated and miserable the whole time! I had to go to an external website to study SQL and learn from there (and it was so much more simple, useful and enjoyable on the external website I went to). Because of the lack of pedagogical skills of the instructor, I do not recommend this course.

An entire lesson video is dedicated to using the regular sum function in Excel. Only if you have been living under a rock for your entire life would you not know how to sum cells in Excel. Whereas all the important syntax of SQL is condensed in one short video. And this is Course 5 Week 4! I wouldn't say it was a complete waste of time as I did learn some new things but I did not gain as much as I had hoped for. I am looking forward to the next course in the specialization but I know I will have to rely on outside resources to learn something substantial and not just superficial knowledge of the tools being taught.

I have really enjoyed this Google course overall, but I did not enjoy the instructor for this portion of the course. The instructor was either very slow and boring (no emotion whatsoever) or I felt like the instructor was yelling at me. I enjoy instructors that I feel like I can relate to and show some type of emotion rather than sounding like a robot. I also didn't like when she went over SQL queries and you were expected to follow along because there is no way you can work along with her as she moves WAY too fast. I had to keep pausing and rewinding constantly which made it difficult to learn as I was instructed.

The rate of information and homework in this course needs to be split up more into about 6 weeks. And ping ponging between SQL and Spreadsheets makes it very difficult to stay focused and retain information. I have thoroughly enjoyed the other 4 courses and they were very low stress. But this one was not fun at all. I had to ask mentors for help and clarification numerous times and found multiple errors in the curriculum as well. It was almost enough for me to decide I am not going to move forward if the other 3 are anything like this, but I am going to anyway. Thank you for asking :-)

I had some troubles with this course. I found some things explained vaguely, while simple things explained repeatedly also from previous courses. I do not think, that there needed to be mentioned ie underscores in the module glossary as it was already explained long before. In some activities, some steps were missing, while some absolutely elementary concepts were mentioned in detail. I also did not like copy paste parts for SQL queries. What do I learn with copy paste? For me this course had very important content, but the way it was thought, was not as needed.

Weird course, it seems like it was done without any planning. The teacher repeats same things over and over again. It is too long, many of the subjects were already covered in previous courses. It is course 5, do we really need to be told what conditional formatting is, for the Nth time? And the whole entire section just about how we should ask people questions and how to use the internet? Sorry but, if we already enrolled into a course, we already know how to use it. Overall, google really missed the target with this one.

The knowledge of BigQuery, SQL and Spreadsheets will be useful. BUT... The instructors put noticably less effort into preparing it than other courses in path. The excercises and tests contain a lot of bugged code and errors in answers. The code, during the whole course, is ridiculously told in obvious sentences (write word xxx and press ; and then press ENTER to move to the next line) but poorly explained why are we using these operations and for what. It needs a lot of additional work in reading and debugging of given code.

Unfortunately out of all of the courses I've taken so far in the Google DA certificate, this was the lowest quality. It was riddled with errors and corrections, and didn't seem to be up to date with the BigQuery public datasets. It was harder to follow through than some of the others, even with a baseline familiarity with SQL and spreadsheet functions. Overall, I did learn a few new things that I think will be helpful as I continue my work in data analysis, but I hope Google considers redoing parts of the course.