Enhancing Analytics: Move from Excel to Python

Good afternoon from London :wave::wave:

It’ll be a nice surprise if I have an audience who underestimates Excel as one of the old-fashioned tools.

This talk is a personal story of my professional career as a Junior Data Scientist since I joined Health Education England in June 2022, but also as a freelancer Coding Instructor teaching SQL and Python in online classes for the last year. It’ll try to deliver giveaway lessions to professionals not only who appreciate the power of Excel but also who are looking to enhance their skillset by filling up the knowledge gap between Excel and Python programming.

Target audience:

- Data Scientists who are in their early careers and are curious about how Excel skills can complement and enhance their programming abilities
- Experienced Excel Users who might be interested in expanding their use case to include Python
- Python Enthusiasts who are keen on incorporating Excel techniques into their Python workflows or bridging the gap between Excel and more advanced programming
- Data Analysts and Modellers who use Excel extensively for data analysis and modelling but would like to branch out towards integrating Python
- Collagues and Fellow Data Professionals who are interested in common ground shared between Excel and Python programming

How it started?

Strangely throughout the projects and classes, I developed my Excel skills much more than before thanks to my colleagues or students who are passionate about programming with a Python script for the first time but also have experience in advanced Excel analysis.

I found people likely to follow the programming flow when they had been exposed to more advanced formulas in Excel; there is even INDEX and MATCH on Excel! By then, I started to make my style in creating Python codes with more parallel examples in spreadsheets and considered more pairs between the familiar platform (i.e., Excel) and the new platform (i.e., Jupyter Notebook or Python IDE) first rather than letting newbies dig in the syntax jungles.

Adversely, this talk can be to introduce a way how I can deliver my coding work frames to be good enough to communicate with a modeller and/or analyst working with Excel who has the potential to make conversions swiftly between Excel spreadsheets and Python’s data frames.

Bridging Excel and Python

… to be continued

2023