Data Analysis Techniques
| Site: | Saylor Academy |
| Course: | BUS250: Introduction to Business Intelligence and Analytics |
| Book: | Data Analysis Techniques |
| Printed by: | Guest user |
| Date: | Tuesday, July 1, 2025, 4:23 PM |
Description
These modules introduce you to some fundamental concepts of data analysis and interpretation. Human decision-makers face the challenge of interpreting the data they have collected and stored in their data warehouse to impart meaning to the data. Once we understand the meaning of the data and can interpret it properly, we can use this information to make decisions. The first step in data analysis often involves presenting data in forms other than simple lists and tables. In this unit, we will explore some formats – graphs, charts, and diagrams. We will then explore how we can organize these data presentation formats into what we call a business intelligence dashboard. Much like the dashboard on your car, we want to present the most critical information in the most convenient form for the decision-maker and store less useful data in a less visible location.
Combining and importing data
Introduction Data Analysis: Visualization and Dashboard Design
Copy paste
Load from File
Felienne explains how instead of copy-pasting the contents of Excel files into one, we can import data from CSV files. If you participated in the previous MOOC EX101x you probably remember we imported data from the web. You can click here to revisit that lecture on EDX or on YouTube. In this video, we import data from a CSV file instead. WARNING! The features shown in the lectures do not exist in every version of Excel.
Combine CSV
What do you do when you need to import more than one CSV file? Felienne shows you in this video.
Combine script
When you start from multiple Excel files, how do you efficiently concatenate them into a single CSV file?
Data Types
In this video Felienne shows how to deal with the inconsistencies that can be introduced into your spreadsheet by importing data from multiple sources.
Source: Adrienne Watt, https://ocw.tudelft.nl/courses/data-analysis-visualization-dashboard-design/subjects/module-1-combining-importing-data/
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
Data Exploration
Introduction Data Exploration
This week Felienne talks about how to perform exploratory analysis on your data.
Pivot Tables and Charts
In this video Felienne shows how to use PivotCharts to explore your data.
Pivot Charts continued
In this video Felienne shows how to use PivotCharts to explore your data.
Power Pivot
The next data exploration tool we are looking at is Power Pivot!
Visualizing Trends
Introduction to Trends
Last week we looked at the past. This week we use our data to predict the future!
Conditional Formatting
In this video Felienne explains how to use conditional formatting to highlight certain parts of your data
Spark Lines
In the previous video Felienne showed you how to use colors to visualize your data. But what are the alternatives to using colors? In this video Felienne uses Spark Lines to visualize the data.
Trend Plotting
In the last two videos we have explored the data to discover trends. In this video Felienne shows you how to present the trends you have discovered in a graph.