The course title is misleading. Various statistical methods are introduced in this course without much thought to ordering, then presented in pre-made Excel templates that are used for the course's final project. The analysis techniques are worth learning, but their connection is not clear, and the difficulty spike from the first week to the second and especially the final project is high. Additionally there were some mistakes in the course that lead to several hours of wasted time in preparing the final project. Prof. Eggers is obviously very knowledgable, so if you are willing to invest more time than the average, this course may be worth taking.

Beware this course, especially if you are new to this area (despite what the course/specialization says). There are very few examples to clarify and illustrate the different topics of the course, but what's worse is that the assignments are almost completely divorced from the instructional videos; the assignments and especially the final project are much more complicated than anything presented in the instructional videos, so there is no knowledge basis from which the student can operate to complete the assignments/projects satisfactorily or smoothly.

I am extremely dissatisfied and wish I hadn't paid for this specialization. Beware.

I am sorry to say this, but the tutorial could have been organzied in a much more serious way.

I do not know how much time the Professors have put on preparation. But it gives me a "sloppy" impression!!! The class carries the name of University of Duke and 70 euros are charged, so I think the learners would reasonably expect to see that the teacher puts lots of time to organize the course structure, in order to efficiently give as much as information to the learners within limited time!

For example, I believe nobody would not say that the Week 2 content on confusion matrix is very consistently explained. And this is just one example.

The lecture videos are not super helpful and the instruction and support for final project is somewhat lacking. You need a relatively solid background coming into doing the project beforehand. Just study the course material is not enough for you to complete your final project, in fact you need peer help or to read more materials to fully understand and finish the project. The quizzes compared to what is asked in the project is too simple and thus not constructive enough in the overall learning. Overall I would recommend you to have a solid background before proceed with this course if you want to improve your learning experiences.

The material is sort of interesting but there is not much hand-holding. I actually am an Excel beginner, and have merely an average grasp of mathematics. Before signing up, I read the prerequisites - there were none! It is advertised as a class for beginners, but I have found it beyond frustrating, and whats more I pre-paid for the specialization so this Excel class and the final project seem to be an utter waste of money without me going off to study Excel at length before trying the course again. Why not label it as an intermediate or higher class? I feel there should be a more obvious indication of the difficulty.

Only Suggested. If you've studied Maths/ Statistics in your undergrad, or if belong to a Commerce background. (That is the limit!)

And mind you, there are many glitches. Many.

There is no continuous flow; the video is not good; the audio is not good; the instructor seems way more casual and relaxed (even did a 15-20 second dance, can you believe it?!)

And sure the things taught and the things asked, are quite different from each other. But maybe if you've the 'needed' background, you might do it just as well.

Anyhow, if you do finish the course at last, it's all worth it.

I guess!?

It has a lot of problems, including: Not so many lectures about excel itself - most of the time you will be watching videos about statistic methods. The lectures are very superficial, even though the quizzes and projects demand a lot of knowledge and time. The course seems to have a staff of one man: the professor of the course rarely replies (even though he did at the beginning of the session) and all the work seems to be done by his assistant, who tries his best, but ends up not coping with all the questions asked at the discussion forums.

The content is really interesting and useful. However, the way in which the lessons are organised I'd say is confusing. The professor explain you complex concepts like entropy or binary classification to continue with an excel worksheet. It's here where the issue relays, the excel files are filled and instead of learning by doing you have to figure out how the prof made the file. In consequence, the solution is always available.

In my opinion, it'd be better if a raw data set is given and you build the model step by step from the scratch.

Though the course teaches important topics, I found the practical part of it rather lacking. The videos are mostly about the theory, using algebra and all that, but the exercises are on Excel spreadsheets that either you don't really need to do much (change a number here or there) or, when you do need to really work on it, there's no instruction provided other than the discussion forums and an one-page PDF. It was very disappointing, prepare yourself to spend a lot longer on this course, just trying to understand the spreadsheets.

The course is very poorly laid out. You are encouraged to work on your final project each week during each module but you don't learn important key elements to complete the final project until later in the course. I enjoyed what I learned in this class, however, stating there are no math prerequisites is misleading. If we were taught the concepts only in Excel, that would be one thing, but to hand solve these statistics problems by hand it really hurts the learn because the professor is speaking above most everyone's head.

Actually a nice course but I feel completely lost with the last and final assignment. I looked through the forum, there are good hints but i still don't get it. It's frustrating that for the really hard stuff you don't have any explainatory videos from Prof. Egger so you can comprehend the material better.

I understand that one has to try to work out a solution with the methods given but a explanation of the difficult stuff afterwards would be quite helpful sometimes.

It is best to have a strong statistical background before taking this course. Lots of statistical calculations and procedures. If you don't have a strong background in statistics , there is a good chance you will get lost at some point in the course. There is no questions that the instructor of this course is an accomplished mathematician, I just found it hard to follow his lectures as he got deeper into various statistical aspects of the course.

Much work needs to be done on this course to make it friendly to learners. The quizzes and assignments do not align with what is taught in the lessons. Further, the content in the lessons does not even show or explain what is expected from the learning.

I spent the majority of my time exploring the discussions to discover what I was supposed to be doing and the rest of it on Google teaching myself the concepts that were not taught in the course.

The professor jumps from subject to subject like if he assumes that people know the stuff he is teaching. Sometimes he goes on about something without telling you why he started talking about it, how it will be used, what is its relations with the whole course or at least that week's course. He even goes on to start the definition of a concept but then starts talking about an example and does not go back to the actual definition or use.

First of all, it's important to point out that this course hasn't got a lot to do with Excel. It's more about statistics.

I am somewhat disappointed with this course. A lot of the assignments and tests were unclear, and it was hard to get clarifying information that will help you proceed. I was often left confused about some of the topics. Nevertheless, I learned some techniques that will probably be prove very valuable in the future.

I found this course too advanced for my level of familiarity with statistics. Its true that most basic stuff is covered to be fair, but the progression is very rapid.

As I work long hours and other commitments I didn't have enough time to dedicate to study beyond the time needed just for this course. If I had been able to study an extra 10 hours a week practicing using the formulas then I'm sure I would have got more out of it.

The description of the course series does not adequately represent what is taught, more details up front about the material covered would have helped set expectations. The first course in the series focuses primarily on terminology, with little practical application. Almost all of the material was on finance & accounting.

In week 2 of this course, I realized this wasn't addressing what I expected and dropped out.

All theory. Quizzes you were left with the task of answering questions based on models never seen or explained spent most time trying to make sense of them. Final project is almost a joke to try and decipher how to create from scratch based on the ones they provided in the quizzes. Its not a joke but it is very difficult when the actual excel and model making isnt part of the lectures.

So many equations presented without explaining why these things work or how they are derived. I'm having a hard time seeing the relevance. Also, I learned a lot of these statistics in college and the explanations provided in these lessons actually confused me about things I already know. Very disappointed in this course. Especially since part 1 of the specialization was so good.

I would have liked the class to be less theoretical, with more frequent explanations linking concepts to practical applications in daily / business life, in order to keep interest and motivation high and facilitate understanding and memorisation. It sure would help to enter this course with a certain background of probability. Those memories were too ancient in my case :-(

Not recommended if you're a beginner. I don't understand a single bit of the math involved in this course, it is explained little if at all. Every time I start a video I have to stop and learn from elsewhere how to learn from this course. I'm sure it's great for people that know what is going on, but if you don't understand one thing at any point you're lost for good.

I wish this course was more focused on building and analyzing data in excel. It feels like it's more focused on financial measurements and probability, it hasn't related to my line of work yet (marketing analysis). I wish the course also focused on advanced excel formulas outside of probability like advanced pivot tables, arrays, and macros.

While the first week touched on Excel and the equations can be used in Excel and have efficacy in regards to analyzing data, it feels as if the course emphasizes more on utilizing math than utilizing Excel. And according to my understanding, that was what I thought I was signing up for. So, it felt like a bait-and-switch to me.

This Course has the wrong title, as many others mentioned prior to me. It was a lot about statistics and math, but the thing was that none of it was explained very well. It was unorganised and sometimes had crucial mistakes in it, which wasted a lot of my time. I give it two stars, because I learned a little Excel.

The course name is very misleading. While overall it is not a bad course, I believe a lot of people come here expecting very different material. Let's just put it this way: Mastering Data Analysis (mostly things to do with probability) with occasional use of Excel. Do not expect to learn anything new in excel.