Charge your team’s data powers fast
On this page you’ll learn about custom workshops I offer based on my book Advancing into Analytics, how you’ll benefit and how to get started.
About the book
The book’s official description follows:
Author George Mount, founder and CEO of Stringfest Analytics, clearly and gently guides intermediate Excel users to a solid understanding of analytics and the data stack. This book demonstrates key statistical concepts from spreadsheets and pivots your existing knowledge about data manipulation into R and Python programming.
With this practical book at your side, you’ll learn how to:
- Explore a dataset for potential research questions to check assumptions and to build hypotheses
- Make compelling business recommendations using inferential statistics
- Load, view, and write datasets using R and Python
- Perform common data wrangling tasks such as sorting, filtering, and aggregating using R and Python
- Navigate and execute code in Jupyter notebooks
- Identify, install, and implement the most useful open source packages for your needs
- And more
To learn more, visit stringfestanalytics.com/book/. You’ll even find a way to read the book for free, if you’d like to preview before continuing.
Custom workshops
These customized workshops, delivered either in person or virtually, are for teams looking to learn and build a culture of data and statistical literacy in their organization. Very few of us received a formal analytics education. This workshop gives you the rigor of an O’Reilly book with the relevance of your own organization’s data and examples.
Due to their hands-on and participative nature, sessions work best for groups of up to 20 in-person or 35 online participants.
Pick your tool(s)
Advancing into Analytics is delivered in three parts, and workshops are customized to these elements based on your preferences::
- Foundations of Analytics in Excel: In this component, you will learn how to explore and test relationships between variables using Excel.
This grounding in statistical theory and framework for conducting analysis will put your team on solid footing for more advanced analytics.
- From Excel to R: With your team fluent in the fundamentals of data analysis, it’s time to pick up a coding language. R, an open source language built especially for statistical analysis, is a great choice.
Your team will see how to cleanly transfer what you’ve learned about working with data from Excel into R, concluding with a capstone using a dataset of your choice.
- From Excel to Python: Python is another open source language worth learning for analytics. With this component, your team will learn how to pivot Excel data chops into this language and conduct a complete data analysis using your examples.
Full-day workshop
By the end of this full-day workshop, learners will be able to explore and confirm insights in their data using Excel, R and Python. Based on the principles of the book, the workshop teaches fundamentals of statistical thinking and data exploration, with emphasis on delivering insights for management buy-in.
Learners will not just get hands-on practice programming and crunching data but take the first steps toward using the results to inspire real action in your organization.
Half-day workshop
By the end of this half-day workshop, learners will develop a framework to explore, manipulate and visualize data in Excel and either Python or R. Your team will have a process ready to take on its next data analysis project.
Two-hour workshop
In this two-hour workshop, we’ll discuss a strategy for exploring data and where the data analysis could lead next. An overview of the data analytics stack is provided for your team to evaluate its technical capabilities.
There will also be ample time to take questions using examples from your own work.
These workshops will NOT…
make your team machine learning engineers. Not everybody in an organization needs to be deploying algorithms into production and in fact there are real problems if that’s the only use case you see for data in your organization.
These workshops WILL…
help your “accidental analysts” and “citizen data scientists” size up datasets, tee off analyses, interpret results and know what to do next with your analytics initiatives.
We don’t all have STEM backgrounds. Not everyone enjoyed math in school. But here many of us are, the default “data people” in our department. This workshop can provide “what you wish you’d known” before you landed waist-deep in data.
How you’ll benefit
Boost data skills practically
Professionals in any role or function stand to gain from data fluency. But where should they start?
Data skills are now essential for almost every role in every organization. … We encourage people to focus on the basics.
“Boost Your Team’s Data Literacy” by Josh Bersin and Marc Zao-Sanders, Harvard Business Review
Your team doesn’t need to spend thousands of dollars on software licenses to immediately get value from data. Excel — available to nearly every professional — is capable of quick, interpretable data analysis. There’s no better choice than Excel to really get your hands on the data. But Excel can’t do everything… that’s where other applications come in.
Do you like free things? Join the club of hundreds of thousands of Python and R enthusiasts using this free, open source software.
These programs allow you to conduct sophisticated data analysis for a variety of circumstances. Best of all, you don’t have to be a data scientist to benefit from them. The learning curve drops steeply with a bit of Excel knowledge, and these workshops will help you conquer them with the least friction.
Excel, Python and R are inexpensive. They are powerful. And they work well together.
Expand your analytics reach
A typical question for me is “Why do I need to learn Python or R when there’s already Power Query, Power BI, etc?”
Indeed, Microsoft has come up with a great stack of tools over the years. You can continue to benefit from that stack and use Python and R… in fact, Microsoft wants you to use R and Python with Excel, Power BI, etc.
There are already great use cases for R and Python with Power BI. From visualization to data cleaning to statistical modeling, R and Python can go hand-in-hand with Microsoft’s own capabilities.
But wait, there’s more… If you’re particularly interested in how this relates to Excel, then there’s every indication that Microsoft will soon offer official integration of Python with Excel.
No one can be an expert in everything. But given how Microsoft has designed it’s stack, there’s no downside to a primer in Python and R. This book and its workshop are your primer.
Unleash experimentation
By combining the power of software and the rigor of controlled experiments, companies can turn themselves into learning organizations—turbocharged!
Stefan H. Thomke, Experimentation Works: The Surprising Power of Business Experiments
It’s one thing to have the technical chops… quite another to frame problems soundly, evaluate results and implement findings. This is where business research comes in. Your team will learn the basics of thinking through where data comes from, identifying biases, and validating results.
It’s never been easier as a business to test and learn through the power of experiments, powered by data and your team.
What people are saying
Here’s some feedback from attendees of previous events related to Advancing into Analytics:
George offers a practical touch, making the book relevant for an organization’s day-to-day use of analytics.
Michael Olafusi, Managing Director, UrBizEdge
George recently gave a session for our financial modelling meetup group and he really knows how to engage an audience! The session was clear, concise and he was able to explain concepts both for those with some coding experience and those new to it. George drew ideas from the book and showed us to complement our current Excel skillset with Python and R, demystifying these languages and left us inspired to learn more!
Danielle Stein Fairhurst, Financial modelling consultant, Plum Solutions
The London Excel Meetup was proud to host George in June 2021 to present on advancing into analytics with R and Python in Excel. The majority of the attendees had no experience in either R or Python. George presented the information step-by-step and made himself available for questions by our attendees. He shared files for the examples that he demonstrated so people could practise and was clearly well prepared for the presentation. I would not hesitate to welcome George back
Alan Murray, Founder, Computergaga
Get started
Ready to upskill your data team?
Drop me a line to get started, or schedule a call on Microsoft Bookings. I look forward to becoming savvier about data with you.
Complete this form and I will get back to you shortly with next steps:
You’re also welcome to book a call with me to discuss your needs. The meeting will be held online via Microsoft Bookings.
