Data Visualization and Building Dashboards with Excel and Cognos

Data Visualization and Building Dashboards with Excel and Cognos

This course provides students with the basics required to create data visualizations and dashboards using both Microsoft Excel and IBM Cognos Analytics. You begin the process of telling a story about your data by creating several basic and advanced charts in Excel and learning how to add them to a digital dashboard. You then become familiar with IBM Cognos Analytics - a popular tool for data visualization and analytics – and learn how to use it to create interactive and informative dashboards. By completing this course, you will gain a basic understanding of using spreadsheets as a tool for data visualization. You will also gain the ability to create effective data visualizations, such as charts or graphs, and you will start to see how they can play a key role in the communication of your data analysis findings to interested parties. All of this can be accomplished without the need to write any code. By the end of this course you will be able to describe common dashboarding tools used by a data analyst, design and create a dashboard in a cloud platform, and begin to raise your level of confidence when creating intermediate level data visualizations.

The emphasis is on applied learning and hands-on practice in this course, and with each hands-on lab, you will gain further experience in the creation of basic and advanced charts and the creation of digital dashboards using both Excel and Cognos Analytics. The final assignment project will allow you to apply these newly acquired skills to create and use data visualizations and add them to a digital dashboard to fulfil a business scenario.