From Spreadsheets to Data Analysis
Bring your spreadsheet skills into structured, repeatable data analysis
A taste of a lesson
I use a lookup to pull customer region into my sales sheet. Some customers appear twice in the customer list. Problem?
Yes, quietly. An exact match lookup returns the first match it finds and ignores the rest, so if a customer appears twice with different regions, you get whichever row comes first, with no warning. First check how many duplicates exist: count each customer ID in the customer list. Then decide which row is correct, perhaps the most recent, and fix the source list. In SQL terms, your lookup is a join that hides duplicates. How many customer IDs appear more than once?
Written by the teacher as an example. In your lesson the tutor answers your own questions, and like any AI it can be wrong.
What you will be able to do
- Restructure data into a tidy table layout
- Avoid merged cells, hard coded numbers and other common error sources
- Translate pivot tables and lookups into grouping and joins
- Make a spreadsheet analysis repeatable and checkable
- Decide when to move to SQL or a notebook
Lesson plan
- 1 Tidy tables Reshape data into one row per observation and one column per variable. Start
- 2 Error prone habits Recognise and remove the habits that cause silent errors. Start
- 3 Pivots, filters and lookups Map spreadsheet tools to analysis concepts. Start
- 4 Making work repeatable Separate raw data, calculations and outputs. Start
- 5 Checking and AI help Verify results and use AI assistants responsibly. Start
- 6 When to move on Judge when SQL or a notebook would serve you better. Start
Try asking
About this tutor
A beginner tutor for confident spreadsheet users who want to work with data more reliably. You will learn tidy data structure, why merged cells and hard coded numbers cause errors, how pivot tables map to grouping and lookups map to joins, and how to make an analysis repeatable and checkable. Lessons also explain when a spreadsheet is the right tool and when to move to SQL or a notebook, and how to use AI assistants to write formulas or queries while still verifying the results. You finish by rebuilding one of your own spreadsheets in a cleaner way.
Reviews
4.3
3 ratingsSample
- Margaret E.Sample
I have used spreadsheets for twenty years and this finally explained why my monthly report broke so often. Tidy tables changed everything.
- Hina Y.Sample
Helpful and practical. The AI formula checking habit is something my whole team now uses.
- Javier T.Sample
Respectful of what I already knew. The lookups are joins idea made SQL much less scary.
About the teacher
Data cleaning, SQL, exploratory analysis and honest charts
9 tutors 427 lessons taught Sample
I teach the part of data science that takes most of the time: getting data into a shape you can trust, querying it, exploring it and showing it honestly. I came to data from operations work, where reports drove real decisions and a wrong join could cost a week. I teach by handing you small, deliberately messy tables and asking...
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