Application Time - Week 3

This time it's Excel basics, instead of studying of definitions from the last two weeks, which was a review of statistical terminologies and the essentials of an analyst. Some of the Excel basics that would be useful as an analyst were CSV Data Import, Text File Data Import, SQL Database Data Import. What I got from it is that there are different datasets that I will be gathering which is definitely not from only one software. So it's important to know the basic of importing first before anything or whatever data I will be gathering or obtaining it from would be rendered useless if I don't know how to import it to Excel.

So why Excel anyway in the first place? Let's go back first from the lesson we learned from the first two weeks, as an analyst you need to be able to do three things:

1. Get data out of a system
2. Transform that data and make it easy to be utilized in any software
3. Analyze and visualize the data

Excel is useful for steps 2 and 3, for basic purposes that is and since I am still tackling on Excel first I think that the things that I'm learning so far is enough for me to be able to transform, analyze and display it in some sort of model or any visualization. Most analysts use Excel on a far less sophisticated level and I'm looking forward to the next tools that I'll be utilizing in the next weeks.

Now that we've gotten that out of the way some of the Excel functions that I was able to tackle as I was watching through the tutorials were Sum If Count, VLookup, HLookup, Index and Match, If Error, and If NA. They're not really on an advance level yet and it's pretty beginner level so I'm catching up just fine in terms of both executing them on my own and trying out the functions on the resources provided for my study.

I'm going to stray a little bit off Excel since that's how far I've come with the third week as I'm writing this, but there were some tasks that were to be done while also going through the study materials. First was a collective project of creating an Excel file from an dataset provided. I like that we were collaboratively sharing our inputs and it gives me a feel of what working with a team and it's actually one of the things that I'd like to do in the future.

I'm currently working while being a student but only as a virtual assistant, so it would be nice to be working on big data projects in the future since I aspire to be a data analyst or engineer depending on which of the two I gain a feel with.

While there was a discussion with the collaborative work I did find myself questioning some of the things that they were discussing. I am an irregular student so some of the things that were discussed are foreign to me. Though I had to research some of it so that I'll be able to understand, I still can't fully understand some of the things that my peers were discussing because I am a bit behind. That is not something that will hinder me though since all I have to do is catch up and study more which I did and I still am confused but at least I understood the output that we submitted as a class overall.

I'm going to make this a two-part segment because I have already mixed both Week 3 and Week 4.

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