Data Analytics Certification Program

A certification Program on ‘Data Analytics’ was conducted for II Sem BCA students from 28th Jan’19 to 5th Feb ’19 between 1:30 pm and 4:30 pm at the Computer Lab, DSBA by NICT Computer Education.

The instructor, Mr Supreeth Garla -BE, Mechanical Engineering graduate from R. V. College of Engineering, Bangalore also pursued MBA, International Business from James Cook University, Singapore. He worked as Software Engineer at Accenture and has been a Director of Blliss Chocolates Pvt Ltd. Presently, he is an Executive Director of NICT Computer Education Pvt Ltd. He is well versed at -Social Media Marketing, Website Design, Digital Marketing, SEO, Google Adwords certified EMAIL Marketing & a Business Consultant.

 

The program commenced on day one with an Ice breaking session. Later, with the access to their server, we were able to practically learn MS Excel which features calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for applications. It has been a very widely applied spreadsheet for many platforms. Basic Elements of Excel are Spreadsheets, Cells, Tab Customization, Arithmetic Operations, Data Manipulators and Filters.

The second session was about learning the functions and features of excel and applying them with the respective exercise. Here, we were able to get to know about Excel a little more and our work was appreciated. Mr Garla was totally dedicated and explained us perfectly. We solved, sorted, and filtered the workbook. The examples given and exercises were practical and applicable. Conditional formatting, Absolute reference, Data validation, Sorting, Logical functions were covered in this session. The following was also taught -To sort the data according to Alphabets, digits and fractions, to apply fonts formats to cells, rows and column and data validation to make sure that users enter certain values into a cell.

Now that we were very much comfortable with the concept, in the third session, we were introduced to the Facilitator. We began to learn and do things easily and with humungous concentration, our mind was set to take EXCEL to help us take a step to excel in life! In this session we learnt how to apply a same formula for an entire row or column to avoid extra work and to save our time with applying Absolute Reference, as it is used to lock a particular row or column and keep it constant for our execution. Data validation was introduced to us. Data validation can be used to restrict the type of data or the values that users enter into a cell. One of the most common data validations used is to create a drop-down list. Let’s say one has a worksheet with thousands of rows of data. It would be extremely difficult to see patterns and trends just from examining the raw information. Similar to charts and Sparkline’s, conditional formatting provides another way to visualize data and make worksheets easier to understand. The essence of Excel logical functions AND, OR, XOR and NOT provides formula examples that demonstrate their common and inventive uses.  

The fourth session gave us insight on important applications and things one needs to know. Everything we had learnt in previous sessions had a very practical usage. All were excited to learn further more. We were taught the following:

 Consolidate -One can use Excel’s consolidate feature to consolidate one’s worksheets (located in one workbook or multiple workbooks) into one worksheet.  

Data cleaning- Data forms back the backbone of any analysis that one does in Excel. And when it comes to data, there are tons of things that can go wrong – be it the structure, placement, formatting, extra spaces, etc.  

What If Analysis -In Excel one can use several different sets of values in one or more formulas to explore all the various results.

The fifth and sixth-day’s session happened to be everyone’s favourite. In all the previous sessions, we learnt about the data form of manipulations and here we used data to create charts and graphs this was obviously interesting. The graphics and the way of analysing data through charts was exciting. It can often be difficult to interpret Excel workbooks that contain a lot of data. Charts allows one to illustrate their workbook data graphically, which makes it easy to visualize comparisons and trends. Excel has several different types of charts, allowing one to choose the one that best fits their data. In addition to chart types, one needs to understand how to read a chart.

Chart layout and style -After inserting a chart, there are several things one may want to change about the way one’s data is displayed. It’s easy to edit a chart’s layout and style from the design tab. It allows one to add chart elements such as chart titles, legends, data labels, error bars, and gridlines.

 

 

The seventh session was the last session of the course; wherein, the facilitator gave us a great pathetic twist that there will be no exam conducted on the sessions that we did. All were literally relaxed. In this session Mr Supreeth tried to teach us the power bi software practically with access to their server, but unfortunately it wasn’t possible as the serve was lagging a lot, so he gave us a demo in which he showed us practically how to imply and analyse the data in that software.  Power BI is a business analytics solution that lets one visualize their data and share insights across your organization, or embed them in one’s app or website. Here, the end users can create reports and dashboards by themselves, without having to depend on information technology staff or database administrators.  The power BI primary tools include Power query to extract and transform; Power pivot to model and analyse; and Power view and map to visualize data. 

For the students it was the perfect time to start a journey into the world of big data analytics as the topic's importance is so vital, there's no denying how critical this discipline is likely to become in the very near future. It’s definitely a great skill to learn! 

 

                                                                                                                                    Sagar V P