Data Analysis with Microsoft Excell, a begginers guide!

#beginners

Introduction to excel fundamentals...

Excel is often the first and most important tool in any analyst’s toolkit. This beginner-friendly guide walks you through Excel step by step, starting with the basics and building toward practical use cases, cleaning data, running calculations, and uncovering patterns.

1.Basic installation and first time using.

In this chapter, we will look at the basics on installing excell on our local computer, feel comfortable opening and using Excel

Use this link to download and install;[(https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/office.aspx)]

However, most windows operating systems come with the excel pre installed as part of microsoft office.
Use the installed excell and learn basic the excel interface:
Key words to note;
Workbook and worksheet
Workbook- is in the simplest term the collection of excell data sheets
Worksheet- is a template containing rows and columns where you enter data.
-Rows- Rows run horizontally (left to right). Contains a complete record
-Columns- Columns run vertically (top to bottom).
-Cells-cell is where a row and a column meet, where data is entered, one piece of information
So by the end of this first lesson, we all should be able to download, install and open excell
Enter sample data in an excell worksheet and save the sheet.

2.Core basics and exercises

In this stage, we will learn to for perform simple tasks.
Cell formatting (Including data types)
In excell, we have several data types that are recoqnized during data manipulation
Namely: Numbers, Integers, currency, dates, decimal, etc
Excell allows several data analysis options and arithmetic calculation,it allows, addition, subtraction,division, calculating means, averages, standard deviation among others.

By the end of this exercise , we need to be able to use basic formulas confidently to manipulate the excell data we just entered

3. Data cleaning and logical functions

Next comes learning the core fundamentals, this will include formatting cells, sorting and filtering data, and using basic formulas like addition, subtraction, averages, and percentages.

Therefore we will work with real datasets, not just small tables.
Data cleaning is the foundation of accurate data analysis. Data must be cleaned — because even the best analysis will fail if the data is incomplete or incorrect.
Common data problems; Missing or blank values, Duplicate records, Inconsistent formatting (dates, text, numbers).

Data validation- Is the process that ensures the cleaning process didn’t introduce new mistakes. During data entry , one can set a primary key to ensure standardization to avoid duplication..

However incase of a duplicate, excel has a remove duplicate function that allows you to find and remove duplicate
Conditional formatting,- is a data cleaning method that changes the color of the selected cells based on the rules you define.

4. Analysis and Visualization

Excell allows you to transform messy data into visuals that are easy to understand and draw conclusions to make business decisions. There are several tools for this task:
• Bar and column charts for comparisons and pivot charts
• Line charts for trends over time-data involving dates
• Pie charts for proportions
• Simple KPIs (growth, share, averages)