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Google Data Analytics Professional Certificate | 5 Analyse Data to Answer Questions

Writer: goldenstateservicesj
goldenstateservicesj
Sep 28, 2023
3 min read

tl:dr

  • I’m currently completing the Google Data Analytics Professional Certificate in an effort to sidestep careers to become a Data Analyst

  • I just wanted to reflect on some specific things that surprised me, made me think or something I can relate back to volleyball analysis.  They include:

    • Structured Query Language (SQL) is still so hard to learn

    • I finally learned what VLOOKUP is

    • Learning how to perform data calculations in spreadsheets and SQL was pretty easy

Reflecting on Course 5 | Analyse Data to Answer Questions

I am currently completing the Google Data Analytics Professional Certificate in an effort to sidestep careers and become a Data Analyst.  It has eight courses and I wanted to reflect on each before moving on to the next course.  See the links below as I update them.  

This blog post isn’t a full recap of the course.  I just wanted to reflect on specific things that surprised me, made me think or something I can relate back to volleyball analysis.

SQL is Still So Hard to Learn

Structured Query Language (SQL) is a programming language that allows you to extract data from multiple databases via written queries.  I noted in the last course that SQL is a tough language to learn.  The course does have baby steps to teach the basics then at one point it suddenly went berserk with a complicated query.  So for example, below is a basic query that you learn.  You want to return all columns of data (SELECT *) from a table (FROM warehouse_orders.orders) where the order date is 2019-01-01 (WHERE order_date = ‘2019-01-01’).  Fairly easy.  They introduced some other functions that made it a little more complicated but it was still baby steps.  

Then at one point during the course, it introduced a few more new functions and they decided to put it all into one query (see below).  WTF!  One missing or misplaced character and the query would fail.  For example, I also wrote the very last line as HAVING COUNT(orders.order_id > 0) and it returned an error.  I later realised it was because I closed the parenthesis in the wrong place and it should have been HAVING COUNT(orders.order_id) > 0.  I did have to write some notes (in red writing starting with #) so I understood what each line of the query was doing.  

Finally Learning What VLOOKUP Is

I have seen this VLOOKUP in some spreadsheets and I read it is super important in data analysis but never learnt what it is – until now!  So VLOOKUP is a spreadsheet function that vertically searches for a certain value in a column to return a corresponding piece of information.  So if you had a column of items and a column of their price, you could look for the item in one column and return the price in the second column.  However, I haven’t really thought of how I could use it in any volleyball spreadsheets.

Skimming Through Data Calculations in Spreadsheets and SQL

The last part of the course was learning how to perform data calculations in spreadsheets and SQL.  It was nice that after trying to get to grips with SQL, this part was easy.  I did learn some new functions, such as AVERAGEIF, MAXIF, SUMPRODUCT, but it was easy to understand.  

Final Thoughts

SQL is still kicking my arse.  I know I learnt best if I can use it in practice.  There’s a public dataset of London Bike Rides (the Boris bikes I think) that I can do some basic analysis on, e.g. longest duration, average duration, top 10 most common routes etc. 

Charting My Pages of Notes

Since this is a data analytics course, I thought I should chart something.  I went with the number of pages of notes I typed up.  It’s a proxy indication of things I didn’t know.  

 
 
 

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