SSI 2019 New Course Spotlight: "Intermediate Excel for Personal and Professional Use" with Maliki Ghossainy

March 5, 2019 • by Staff Writer

The 12th annual Summer Statistics Institute will include the new course "Intermediate Excel for Personal and Professional Use" wih Maliki Ghossainy.

Ghossainy

Instructor Biography

Maliki received her Ph.D. in Psychology in 2015 and M.S. in Statistics in 2016 from The University of Texas at Austin. She is an experienced statistical and economic consultant for clients in the private and public sectors. In addition, Maliki teaches undergraduate and graduate level courses in Research Design, Statistical Methods for social sciences, and Developmental Psychology. Presently, Maliki is a Lecturer at the American University of Beirut.

What is the main goal of this course? What makes you excited about teaching this course?

Whether you are a researcher, administrator, or entrepreneur, proficiency with Excel is a powerful asset that can elevate your ability to leverage your data. The aim of this course is to enhance the proficiency of new or recent Excel users who need to store, organize, summarize, visualize, and analyze data. In addition, this course will introduce a variety of keyboard shortcuts to promote user efficiency. Mainly, this course is meant to teach you how Excel can help you work smarter, not harder.

How much background knowledge or experience in this subject is required to be able to follow the course material?

This course assumes basic familiarity with Excel (e.g., how to navigate a spreadsheet, how to copy & paste). That said, the first module of this course will provide a refresher to some of Excel’s basic functionality so new users should not be discouraged to take this course.

What skills and knowledge can participants expect to acquire by the end of the course?

Upon completion of this course, you will learn to use some of the more advanced features of Excel, such as linking worksheets and workbooks, using pivot tables and charts, writing complex, dynamic functions, and using conditionals, named ranges, and basic macros for enhanced formatting. You will learn to use lookup functions (e.g. VLOOKUP, HLOOKUP, INDIRECT, INDEX, MATCH), logical functions (e.g., COUNTIF, SUMIF) and calculation functions (e.g., SUMPRODUCT, SUBTOTAL).

What interested you in teaching this course?

We all know that proficiency with Excel is an expected skill for many public and private sector jobs. By offering this course, I can help current Excel users who are interested in taking their Excel knowledge to the next level and expanding their Excel toolkit. In addition, many of the more advanced courses at SSI require basic knowledge of Excel. By offering this course, I can also help early learners of statistics and data analysis become well positioned to pursue some of the other SSI course offerings in the future.

 

The Department of Statistics and Data Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin is proud to host the 12th annual UT Summer Statistics Institute (SSI) May 28 - 31, 2019. Registration is now open!

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