MS Excel: WARNING! Analytics & Dashboards — This Is A Post For Accountants…
But Any Business Analyst Type Would Benefit!
One of my favorite sources of Microsoft Excel tutorials is the @excelisfun channel on YouTube created and maintained by Mike Girvin. Mike’s content is high quality, informative and some of the best I have seen.
Recently, he hosted a series of sessions targeted at accountants. Two of his videos explored a few more advanced data analytics and reporting topics — Power Query, Power Pivot, Pivot Tables and Power BI.
IF your job entails working with data — these are must watch videos. They only scratch the surface as to the capabilities of these Excel tools, but they provide an excellent awareness of what the potential is.
Do yourself a favor and spend the 92 minutes it takes to watch these.
Power Query, Pivot Tables and Reports (0:51:23)
“This video will teach you about how to use Power Query and PivotTables to clean, transform data and make summary PivotTable Reports. Take multiple Text files and import them into a single table which can be used for PivotTable reports and can be updated easily when new data arrives.”
Introduction to Power BI Desktop — Build Reports & Dashboards (0:40:44)
“Complete Introduction to Power BI Desktop. This video will teach you about how to use Power BI Desktop to clean, transform data and make a Dashboard to Monitor Sales. Take multiple Text files and import them into a single table which can be used for Reports and Dashboards and can be updated easily when new data arrives.”
Whether or not you will utilize these Excel tools is not the important thing — it’s developing an awareness so you know that they exist and how they might be relevant down the road.
The bottom line? Every job is becoming an information management job, and information management means understanding data — starting here!
About Don
“It’s time for different”
Don is passionate about helping professionals and organizations keep up and adapt to the changing business world that we operate in.
“What Do You Do?”
I frequently get this question. My response (it’s not what you think!)? Check it out here!
