Udemy - Maven Analytics

Thoughts about Maven Analytics Excel Pivot Tables course on Udemy

Check out Maven Analytics here.

TL;DR: Best, most thorough Pivot Table explanation I've come across with tons of practice. Highly recommend.

I've had my eye on Maven Analytics for a while now, figuring it would be my next subscription for learning. In fact, this course solidified that choice for me. Maven will be my next learning hub.

While I was browsing my library catalog for physical books I could borrow, I learned that my library has access to Udemy! Some of Maven Analytics' lessons are on Udemy, so I was stoked to learn this!

I had just finished the IBM course about Excel for Data Analysis, with lookups and pivot tables being the only new items I learned about. I felt like I had a decent grip on them, but I had just downloaded a dataset to explore, and I wasn't exactly sure what I wanted to do with it yet, so I thought I would put that on the back-burner to simmer a little.

I wanted to compare what what was different between what I had seen already and what Maven Analytics had to say. The Maven course is "Microsoft Excel - Data Analysis with Excel Pivot Tables."

It is by far a superior explanation of pivot tables, how they work, what you can do with them, and plenty of practice. The other course was fine for an introduction, but I'm the kind of person that likes to know why something will or won't work a certain way, so this course really hit that for me.

Also, and maybe the best thing, is there was SO MUCH PRACTICE!

I loved having specific questions to answer in the practices, and it was even better when I got the answers correct most of the time! (Watch out for those filters, man.) I found this building my confidence in being able to build a pivot table to explore my data. About 4 assignments in, I started attempting to explore the data and answer the questions before watching the video, as well as noticing things that caught my eye that weren't specific to the assignment.

I also really enjoyed that in the answer key to the assignments, were actual screenshots of the resulting pivot table, so you can see the various fields and filters and how the answer was come across, in case you were incorrect or stumped.

The practices were also varied in size and scope, which was nice.

I can see myself coming back to this more than once to build my skills as I practice and get more familiar with Pivot Tables.