How are your data analysis skills? Excel is certainly making a push to be a “self-service BI tool” in the next version of Office, using PowerPivot and PowerView.
Besides Excel, there are other tools for analyzing data, and free university courses, through coursera.org, to help you get started. I’ve listed a few of the courses here, to give you an idea of what’s available. They require a sizeable chunk of time each week, during a set time period. The courses also have major projects or a final exam, so don’t sign up if you like to take things at your own pace.
Data Analysis
There is a Data Analysis course, led by Assistant Professor Jeff Leek, from the Simply Statistics blog. The course starts Jan. 22, 2013, and runs for 8 weeks. The workload estimate is 3-5 hours a week, with short video lectures and two major projects.
One of the prerequisites for the Data Analysis course is some familiarity with the R statistical programming language (http://www.r-project.org/). I’ve never used it, but R is a free download, and you have almost 6 months to learn a bit about it before the Data Analysis course starts.
Computing for Data Analysis
To get up and running with R, you could enroll in one of the other free courses – Computing for Data Analysis with Associate Professor Roger D. Peng. It’s a 4 week course, starting September 24, 2012, with about 3 hours of video per week, and 2 major projects.
Learn to Program: The Fundamentals
And if you’re completely new to programming, a University of Toronto course can help you learn the basics. Senior Lecturers Jennifer Campbell and Paul Gries, use Python as the language in their introductory course, Learn to Program: The Fundamentals.
Their course starts on September 24, 2012, and runs for 7 weeks. It’s estimated that the workload is 6-8 hours per week, with quizzes and a final exam.
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