This course has more holes than swiss cheese. The instructor makes major leaps without thoroughly explaining things. A lot of times when I started to do a problem set it felt like I had missed 2 or 3 lectures. But I had not, the instructor just leaves you to figure a lot out on your own. The videos are choppy often containing errors that sometimes have a note stating the accurate information. The excel sheets are posted at the end of the lecture as opposed to the beginning. But they have nothing to do with the lectures other than the calculus behind the formulas. So you have to go through cell by cell to figure out what the hell the instructor did and what calculus was being used. I appreciate how the instructor combined a lot of material here but unless you are fresh of calculus 3 or several statistics class then this is complexly crap course.

Horrible instruction. Little to no motivation is supplied for each topic. Moreover, the statistical concepts taught in this course are not preceded by preliminary concepts. For instance, I believe it is not until the course is almost over that the concept of a random variable is discussed. Do not waste your time with this course if your goal is to be more skilled in excel.

1. The scribbling on the videos is not legible. How do you expect students to learn when we can't read that scribble.

2. There is not enough detail within the instruction to complete the quizzes and final exam. I had to switch sessions multiple times in order to do additional research outside the course to complete the quizzes and exams.

3. This course needs a re-do. Please read what students are saying in the forum and on other MOOC review websites. The reviews for this class are NOT good.

Please make changes. I will NOT recommend anyone to take this class

The video just explains the basics but they dont take up detailed examples which are asked in the quizes and then it becomes very difficult to understand the concept

Sheet is hard and too high complex for understand.

Try to explain all statistics knowledge to beginners but all are not in-depth enough which even more confusing!

This course needs better explanations, there is a lack of details and you get lost easily.

This is my first Coursera course and I wasn't sure what to expect. I was hoping for a good experience but preparing myself for mediocrity.

I finished the course at 2am on Monday morning and I've been really impressed, both with the Coursera "infrastructure" and with the quality of the teaching from Daniel Egger and his team. I live in South Africa where tertiary educational standards vary widely, and appear to be on the decline. More and more, we are going to need MOOCs like this from the best universities in the world.

More specifically, relating to this course, I found the video lectures well presented and the quizzes thoughtfully prepared. The Excel models really helped with grasping the concepts and practice.

A couple of suggestions:

a) The course FAQ makes light of the background knowledge necessary to cope with the course. It needs to be more honest about the need for mathematics and statistics. Linear regression is not for sissies, in my opinion.

b) Please tell us at the START of the course that we should attack the project week by week. This advice isn't (unless I missed something) given until you open the week 6 project. Ahem... it's too late by then! I spent a very frantic 4 nights last week crunching the project work, 4 quizzes and the assignment. I got to bed at 2.30am, and i'm not a night owl.

Overwhelmingly though, a really interesting course. I'm already starting the next one.

The course is great as it allows you to apply all the concepts taught in scenarios that are really practical. The resources supplied with the course are extremely useful,and all in all the course is good for anyone trying to understand data analytics.

its a good course but maybe in the future you can add another case for participants to build another model beside bank credit model

Excellent course, I learnt a lot and really enjoyed it. Definitely recommend !

Great course improves data analysis insight

Great course. My one caveat would be that, as other reviews have stated, the name of the course is misleading. In my opinion, this course isn't nearly about Excel as much as it is about probability and statistical analysis. If you haven't taken classes and don't have any experience with these, you will be in for a very rough ride. However, Professor Eggers does a good job of guiding you through it and gives you the resources you need to succeed. It will undoubtedly be tough, but if you are persistent and believe in yourself, you will succeed. And you will come out on the other side better for the wear. Cheers!

Very comprehensive. Lot of theory and practical. My request would be to add a week focusing on a couple models and a couple methods to select metrics and validate confidence.

The exercises, resources and quizzes were really good. I felt they were putting to you to the test to see if you had applicable Excel knowledge.

The videos I believe were not that helpful. Too focused on the arithmetics of statistics, while lacking a stronger explanation behind the logic and the importance of certain concepts such as conditional probability, CLT, etc. The arithmetics you will i) forget ii) can easily look them up. But the logic not so much.

I do think the course should have shown how to run regressions with the Data Add-In. This is a helpful tool, makes more sense than forcing you to do everything manually.

This is overall a great course for learning how to use Excel to analyse and manage data. However, the topics covered do not prepare you for the final project. I had to do a lot of trial and error, and research how to complete certain tasks, as the information given in the lessons is not substantial enough to complete the final project. On the plus side, this forced me to figure things out on my own and and taught me a lesson in perseverance. Coming from a humanities background, this course showed me the basics of using Excel and I now feel comfortable using Excel to analyse and manage large data sets.

There were a lot of holes in the teaching of this class. We covered more statistics content than I did in my full-time MBA statistics class over a few 10 minute YouTube videos. Additionally, there is some calculus which I have not studied in 10 years or so. I would have liked to see more excel functionalities explained to add to my tool bag. With all that being said, I learned from the class and enjoyed some of the spreadsheets that were provided. I expected to be challenged since the course is done through a prestigious university and definitely was.

I learned a lot in this course, but it is definitely not what you would expect from the title! Like many others before me have mentioned, it's more of an advanced statistics course than an excel-based data analytics course. They provide spreadsheets that are already filled with formulas (you really don't get the opportunity to create them yourself, but they are pretty cool nonetheless), BUT they never use the spreadsheets in the lessons and DON'T properly explain how to use them; that said, you're required to understand how to use them for the exams!

I consider myself extremely capable with excel, and a very quick learner with a little bit of teaching and a handful of examples to test out, but when the lessons focused on math instead of how to fit a question to the spreadsheet, I felt pretty lost every time a quiz came around because we weren't taught how to use the spreadsheets to answer the questions (which would have been useful and applicable to my career, actually, unlike the math lessons). Most of the 6-8 hrs a week was not watching the lessons so much as messing around with the spreadsheets during quizzes and guessing where we needed to input data to populate the required results.

I'd honestly recommend this particular course only if it were redone in such a way that the lessons matched the exams better;Doing that would actually provide practical, applicable knowledge to the students.

I would not recommend this course to any one. The things they teach in videos and questions they ask on test are pretty different. First few things are fine then the course turns the other way

Though the Course name is Mastering Data Analysis in Excel. This course will take you beyond Excel mastering skills. Quite a Short Course compare to amount of Statistical and Probability concepts you learn. This course covers most of the concepts and models necessary for any Data Analyst & Data Science students and Professionals. This course is quite challenging and at times frustrating and time consuming but in the end you will feel you learnt something what you don't know. It will be worth your effort.If you don't know something what you don't know. Here is the course, it is an accelerated course. You many not master all of them, you will master some, I can assure any future students Professor will give all the information and concepts that you need to master. Even after completing the exam I keep repeating and going back to videos and notes which is really valuable.

I read some of the other reviews and feel I should comment on some of their criticisms.

The material, objectives and tuition are top-notch. Yes there are things that are unclear and difficult and I you will need to read around the subjects introduced from other sources and persevere.

But that is how you will learn and remember.

So far I have yet to complete the course, I am about to start my 4th attempt, but I get a little further each time and the next presentation acts as revision initially. Daniel Eggar introduces key concepts that you need to master, this course is not spoon fed, but is better for it.

If I have a criticism, perhaps the course is badly named, maybe it should be called "Core statistical concepts for data science using Excel"

This course isn't for the faint hearted, you need a decent background in statistics, intermediate mathematics and good grounding in excel. All of these are covered well in the course but there's a lot to take in and I can imagine it being quite tough for those not so familiar. That said, the topics, examples and tools provided are exactly those required to build a good foundation in Business Analytics and I imagine, Data Science. Prof. Egger as always, delivers the course with great aplomb and shares his considerable knowledge in a wise but unassuming manner. Highly recommended.

I learnt a lot from this course. The first week seemed very straight forward and I was worried the course was a bit too rudimentary. From there it stepped up four or five gears and I had to work hard to reinforce the concepts and apply the concepts.

A really great course for any analyst or anyone seeking the true insight in data. The discussion board is a wealth of knowledge and a good read with tutors posting very plain english easier to understand answers to questions.

I got to learn life skills that are essential for a data analyst. The biggest addition to my knowledge via this course would have to be binary classification and entropy. Although I was familiar with the theory of probability and statistics prior to taking this course, everything was brought into perspective or context in this course. Grateful to Prof. Egger for his enoromous efforts in recording the videos and providing the spreadsheets for our practice and future use.

This Course is awesome!

It is incredible how some concepts clearly defined and put into practice turn into a a powerful tools for data analysis... like binary classification models, confusion matrix, bayes theorem.

I am really enjoying this course... I highly recommended to everyone... thanks a lot professor Daniel Egger for sharing your knowledge with us, Coursera and Duke University for making this course available...

Hungry for more...

Volney Poulson