It is ridiculous hard and leads to ultimate frustration and the wasting of time. I took the excel specialisation beginning from course 1 and had brilliant experiences with it. I am sure that I was able to take something away going through practice challenges and alike. For the advanced segment, however, I really had a hard time going through all of this because it just gets incredibly difficult and students are not encouraged to practice enough, I feel. This then results in not being able to solve the quizzes at the end. I had to look up most of the results using the discussion board and feel that I have not learnt much over the past days, sadly.

the assignments are far more difficult than what we have learned

This course was not well fitted. It felt like rushed

I enjoyed this course so much. I learned a lot about how I can become a better learner. This course was very interesting and useful. I have some tools that I can use to optimize my learning potential.

Even considering that some of the weeks are not well or enough explained (Week 5) or not well developed for the students to progress on the studied fields. (week 6) . I have enjoyed and I would highly recommend it. I added not only new knowledge but also knowhow.

Some of the instructions were a bit difficult to understand. I would suggest as you did in part 2 of the final answer to provide the initial answer to help learners. Or even provide the functions that may be helpful to use.

The complexity of this course is a bit harder than the previous courses. Not totally a bad thing, but it would help to have some review points in between the new learning material.

I did like it, There's a lot in it, Despite all of this they need to enhance the content of the fifth week because its so simple and the exam is so hard.

I learned a lot and understood the purpose of a lot of what I learned in the 1st 3 courses. I can't say that about this course. This felt disjointed, with no clear reason for the topics chosen. The assessments each week seemed to require unnecessary steps, but without completing them you couldn't successful complete the exam. Overall, a disappointing end to the whole specialization. I learned some things, but without a lot of further study I don't know that I know how to apply them.

Great overall specialisation, the explanations weren't as detailed as was the case in the previous 3 courses but overall still satisfied. Required a lot of hard work to get this done.

Pivot tables and macros were not covered in this course despite being alluded to in the course description.

I have completed Basic, Intermediate I and II in a week time each but this final course took more than a month. Only for this course, I had used discussion forums. This final course needs a lot of restructuring to make it understandable like the other 3 courses. There are many complex functions but it was taught in very carefree manner.

Unlike first 3 course this course is wen't down the hill in term of quality of teaching and explaining. The content taught doesn't match the difficulty of assessments therefore you will see high number of people asking for help on discussion forums. There is lot of confusion and lack or sufficient help or guidance.

I am so vegetable.

Awful

I am currently enrolled in a number of online courses here on Coursera, and I am reviewing this from personal experience that this entire series of courses under the specialization thus far is NOTHING LESS THAN AMAZING. The amount of such great quality courses here on Coursera is probably just 5-10%, and they definitely fall into this category.

1. Entire course is very well organised and structured. All workbooks are well-named, ordered, and progressively provided to complement the progress in lecture videos. All these makes it easy to follow along the lessons.

2. The content in every week are well-paced. The amount of content taught in every week are manageable and sufficient. All topics and functions are well-covered, not just briefly mentioned or briefly demonstrated (which happens very often in other courses).

3. All assessments are very well thought out and well organised. Practice Quizzes after the lecture videos allow learners to gain a better understanding, rather than learning based on the videos alone. Practice Challenges and Graded Quizzes towards the end of every week further enhances learning and mastery even further.

The course itself practices what the instructor always repeats: "Practice makes permanent". Personally benefited tremendously from this great course!

Keep it up Macquarie, Prashan & Nicky!

I have completed the “Excel Skill for Business” specialization by Macquarie University after 90+ hours of resilient learning and growth. After completing this specialization, I can confidently say that I have gained deep insights into one of the most powerful spreadsheets and analytics tools i.e. Microsoft excel. The Specialization entails of four courses which covers all the concepts of Excel (Basics to Advanced). I would like to thank Nicky Bull, Prashan Karunaratne and coursera for providing me such a wholesome experience.

Assessments for week 4 and 5 were significantly harder than the rest, and more guidance could have been given for those questions.

The final assessment tests were way more difficult than what was taught in the video lessons. and for someone who is going to start learning excel won't be able to complete the specialization because of the difficulty level of the advanced course's final weekly assessment.

Please, either reduce the difficulty level of the weekly assessment in the advanced course or include such cases/problems in the video lessons.

Rest the experience was great. A lot to learn.

Advanced was a waste of time, money and patience. The other courses (Int 1 - Int 2) were very helpful and I've learnt a lot, but this one was so frustrating! Bad explanations, lack of feedback, gimmicky tasks. I'm happy it's finally over. Hope they fix it for the next students, as it's mandatory to complete the specialization.

The way this course was hurried up with simple explanations compared to the difficult to comprehend assessments was very poor from the faculty. It was as if they were least bothered about the students taking up this course. Previous 3 courses of Essentials, Intermediate 1 & 2 was taught decently, but in this, questions asked in assessments were having a daylight difference between what was taught. It was as if students had to waste their valuable time on understanding the questions first. Even most of the questions in all the assessments in this course was way difficult as they were no where taught in the videos. Week 5 in Advanced was poorly taught. The meaning of teaching is to make a student understand. But here in week 5 the tutor is not evening helping a bit by not explaining why these functions are used. It was so frustrating I had to turn my laptop off. Week 5 did not even help me 1%.

This is a bad experience to have as a student who joined this paid course to learn valuable skills. Now this leaves me with a skeptical thought if to choose Coursera or not again.

I learnt a great deal of things in excel and really didn't know that with excel I can accomplish such feats despite being an everyday MS excel user for many years. I learned so many tools that it will make my job easier, In fact many times easier. The course immediately helped me to clean my project's two year's data and organize it in desirable format so that we can do better analysis. I really liked the use of all the lookup function, (index, match, offset, vlookup, indirect etc and many other useful functions like clean, trim, substitute, left, mid, proper, countifs etc. etc. I can't list them all here. And also from the top of my mind I want to mention about the dashboard. That is an excellent dashboard one can create with MS Excel. I will really be able to flaunt my skills now.

I am really very thankful to all the team members who are responsible to create this course and bring it to me through this platform and also to Prashan and Nikki. Their discussion and introduction part helped me to prepare my mind and expectation list before starting the week. It seems I would really miss them now!

Furthermore, and importantly I would like to thank Coursera for making this course available through this platform and my Grantor who has provided me the grant to complete this amazing course. I really don't know the name of the Grantor but am very thankful to you.

I only have one complaint and it's in regards to the videos that Yvonne Breyer conducted. Her videos are very different that the one's that Nicky and Prashan do. She doesn't explain topics as thoroughly, she doesn't go slow enough and most times feels rushed, and when it comes to her showing a task she is performing she doesn't zoom back out on the screen to show what tab or function within the tab she is selecting. She may mention it but it's much easier to follow when Nicky and Prashan zoom in and out as appropriate. I really think her vidoes need to be reviewed and redone. It makes learning the material that she teaches much more difficult than it should be. If someone could please evaluate the content that Yvonne has done and compare it to Nicky and Prashan and have Yvonne's videos be redone to be more similar to Nicky and Prashans.

Thank you

I have successfully completed the "Excel Skills for Business Specialization offered by a talented team at Macquarie University after more than 80 hours of learning and growth. The journey was tougher as I progressed from essentials to Advanced Skills. Now, I feel empowered to use Excel to do any analysis for professional or personal work. My deepest thanks to the teaching team (Nicky Bull and Prashan), the University for providing such comprehensive training, and my fellow learners with active discussion forums, I learned a lot of skills from them. All this will not be possible without a great platform. Coursera offers technology and digital platform for future learners just like me. Post Covid-19 will push a lot of learners to join the experience. I am confidently recommending the experience to anyone ready to learn new skills in a fun way!

Dear Prof. Nicky Bull, Dr. Prashan Karunaratne, and Prof. Yvonne Breyer,

Thank you so much for creating this specialization. This made me even for confident in using Microsoft Excel and consequently more effective and efficient in my job. There were lots of "AHA" moments during the course as I initially though that my knowledge in excel was enough but it turned out that I was only looking at the basics all these years.

Cheers to helping more students and professionals alike to be productive and efficient in their role in the organization by being an advance learner of excel through this course.

Regards,

REAL PRADO, MECHANICAL ENGINEER, PHILIPPINES