Excel Data Analysis Contents

Part 1: Getting Started with Data Analysis

• Chapter 1: Learning Basic Data-Analysis
• Chapter 2: Working with Data-Analysis Tools
• Chapter 3: Introducing Excel Tables
• Chapter 4: Grabbing Data from External Sources
• Chapter 5: Scrub-a-Dub-Dub: Cleaning Data
• Chapter 6: Analyzing Table Data with Functions

Part 2: Analyzing Data with PivotTables and PivotCharts

• Chapter 7: Creating and Using PivotTables
• Chapter 8: Performing PivotTable Calculations
• Chapter 9: Building PivotCharts

Part 3: Discovering Advanced Data Analysis Tools

• Chapter 10: Tracking Trends and Making Forecasts
• Chapter 11: Analyzing Data with Statistics
• Chapter 12: Analyzing Data with Descriptive
• Chapter 13: Analyzing Data with Inferential Statistics

Part 4: The Part of Tens

• Chapter 14: Ten Things You Ought to Know about Statistics
• Chapter 15: Ten Ways to Analyze Financial Data
• Chapter 16: Ten Ways to Raise Your PivotTable Game

Introduction to Excel Data Analysis For Dummies PDF

The world is bursting at the seams with data. It’s on our computers, it’s in our networks, it’s on the web. Some days, it seems to be in the very air itself, borne on the wind. But here’s the thing: no one actually cares about data.

A collection of data — whether it resides on your PC or some giant server somewhere — is really just a bunch of numbers and text, dates, and times. No one cares about data because data doesn’t mean anything. Data isn’t cool.

Do you know what’s cool? Knowledge is cool. Insight is cool. So how do you turn data into knowledge? How do you tweak data to generate insight? You need to organize that data, and then you need to clean it, sort it, filter it, run calculations on it, and summarize it.

In a word, you need to analyze the data. Now for the good news: If you have (or can get) that data into Excel, you have a giant basket of data analysis tools at your disposal.

Excel really seems to have been made with data analysis in mind, because it offers such a wide variety of features and techniques for organizing, manipulating, and summarizing just about anything that resides in a worksheet.

If you can get your data into Excel, Excel will help you turn that data into knowledge and insight. This book takes you on a tour of Excel’s data-analysis tools.

You learn everything you need to know to make your data spill its secrets and to uncover your data’s hidden-in-plain-sight wisdom.

Best of all, if you already know how to perform the basic Excel chores, you don’t need to learn any other fancy-schmancy Excel techniques to get started in data analysis. Sweet? You bet.

About Excel Data Analysis For Dummies eBook

This book contains 16 chapters (and a bonus appendix), but that doesn’t mean that you have to, as the King says gravely in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, “Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”

If you’ve done a bit of data-analysis work in the past, please feel free to dip into the book wherever it strikes your fancy.

The chapters all present their data analysis info and techniques in readily digestible, bite-sized chunks, so you can certainly graze your way through this book.

However, if you’re brand-spanking new to data analysis — particularly if you’re not even sure what data analysis even is — no problem: I’m here to help.

To get your data analysis education off to a solid start, I highly recommend reading the book’s first three chapters to get some of the basics down cold. From there, you can travel to the more advanced territory, safe in the knowledge that you’ve got some survival skills to fall back on.

What You Can Safely Ignore

This book consists of several hundred pages. Do I expect you to read every word on every page? Yes, I do. Just kidding! No, of course, I don’t. Entire sections — heck, maybe even entire chapters — might contain information that’s not relevant to what you do.

That’s fine and my feelings won’t be hurt if you skim through (or — who’s kidding whom? — skip over) those parts of the book.

If time (or attention) is short, what else might you want to ignore? Okay, in many places throughout the book I provide step-by-step instructions to complete some task.

Each of those steps includes some bold type that gives you the basic instruction. In many cases, however, below that bold text, I offer supplementary information to flesh out or extend or explain the bold instruction.

Am I just showing off how much I know about all this stuff? Yes, sometimes. Do you have to read these extended instructions? Nope. Read the bold stuff, for sure, but feel free to skip the details if they seem unnecessary or unimportant.

This book also contains a few sidebars that are marked with the Technical Stuff icon. These sidebars contain extra information that’s either a bit on the advanced side or go into heroic, often obscure, detail about the topic at hand.

Do you need to read these sidebars? Not at all. Does that make them a waste of page real estate? I don’t think so, because they’re useful for folks interested in delving into the minutiae of data analysis. If that’s not you, ignore away.

If your time is very limited (or you’re just aching to get tonight’s binge-watching started), you can also ignore the information contained in this book’s Tip sidebars.

Yes, these tidbits offer easier and faster ways to get things done, so skipping them to save time now might cost you more time in the long run, but, hey, it’s a judgment call.

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