Lab Orientation and Set-Up
Lab Overview
Scenario/Summary
The software used for the course’s Lab Activities is Microsoft Excel. Microsoft Excel is a software program using spreadsheets to organize numbers and data for analysis using formulas and functions. Tedious calculations can be done using Microsoft Excel, freeing up students to focus on statistical concepts.
Uses:
With Microsoft Excel, you can generate decision-making information quickly by using powerful statistics, understanding and effectively presenting your results with high-quality tabular and graphical output, and sharing your results with others via using a variety of reporting methods. Results from your data analysis enable you to make smarter decisions more quickly by uncovering key facts, patterns, and trends.
Lab Orientation and Set-Up
In your professional life, you can use Microsoft Excel in a variety of areas, including
- survey and market research and direct marketing;
- academia;
- administrative research, human resources, and resource planning;
- medical, scientific, clinical, and social science research;
- planning and forecasting;
- quality improvement;
- reporting and ad hoc decision making; and
- enterprise-level analytic application development.
In this class, we will be using Microsoft Excel for the analytical process – planning, data collecting, data access, data management and preparation, data analysis, reporting, and deployment. Customers use Excel to anticipate change, manage both daily operations and special initiatives more effectively, and realize positive, measurable benefits. By incorporating predictive analytics into their daily operations, they become predictive enterprises – able to direct and automate decisions to meet business goals and achieve measurable competitive advantage.
What Does Predictive Analytics Do?
Predictive analytics informs and directs decision making by applying a combination of advanced analytics and decision optimization to an organization’s enterprise data, with the objective of improving business processes to meet specific organization goals.
Lab Orientation and Set-Up
Predictive analytics offers numerous advantages for organizations recognizing the inherent value locked within their existing enterprise data. Strategically, predictive analytics provides a quantitative foundation for rapidly identifying, objectively evaluating, and confidently pursuing new market opportunities. Tactically, predictive analytics identifies precisely whom to target, how to reach them, when to make contact, and what messages should be communicated. Organizations incorporating predictive analytics into their daily operations in this way improve their business processes, enhancing decision making and gaining the ability to direct, optimize, and automate decisions, on demand, to meet defined business goals. Through predictive analytics, they not only better manage the present, but also increase the probability of future success.
Deliverables
Work through the Lab (link to Introduction and Set Up Instructions Document below). When finished, submit a one-page summary of the navigational challenges and issues you had in set up, as well as what you liked to what excited you about learning Microsoft Excel. Some students may already have this software on their computer. In this instance, please share specifics on what you like and dislike with the program. Submit your summary to the Week 1: Lab Assignment location. APA.