Join host Avery Smith, with Excel expert Matt Brattin about mastering data analytics with Excel in this episode of the Data Career Podcast.

From customizing shortcuts to leveraging advanced functions, Matt shares tips and tricks to take your Excel skills to the next level.

Get insights from an industry pro and boost your chances of landing your dream data job.

Tune in now!

Connect with Matt Brattin:

🤝 Connect on Linkedin

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🎒 Learn About the Excel 4 Academy

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📩 Get my weekly email with helpful data career tips

📊 Come to my next free “How to Land Your First Data Job” training

🏫 Check out my 10-week data analytics bootcamp

Timestamps:

(07:53) - 5 Concepts of Excel you should know

(20:35) - Top Excel Shortcuts

(26:54) - Can you make a dashboard in Excel?

(30:20) - Excel is like Thor’s hammer

Connect with Avery:

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Mentioned in this episode: Join the last cohort of 2025! The LAST cohort of The Data Analytics Accelerator for 2025 kicks off on Monday, December 8th and enrollment is officially open!

To celebrate the end of the year, we’re running a special End-of-Year Sale, where you’ll get: ✅ A discount on your enrollment 🎁 6 bonus gifts, including job listings, interview prep, AI tools + more

If your goal is to land a data job in 2026, this is your chance to get ahead of the competition and start strong.

👉 Join the December Cohort & Claim Your Bonuses: https://DataCareerJumpstart.com/daa https://www.datacareerjumpstart.com/daa

The Lakehouse architecture has emerged as the ideal data architecture for the AI age. It unites the structured world of analytics with the rapidly evolving world of AI.But what really makes something a “Lakehouse” and why should you care? In this session, Databricks discusses the key components of a lakehouse, what you should look for when adapting this paradigm and how Databricks and dbt are together enabling analytics engineers, analysts and data scientists to collaborate together on a single unified platform.

Speaker: Thor List, Senior Field Engineering Manager, Databricks

Register for Coalesce at https://coalesce.getdbt.com

Have you ever noticed that recipes that include estimates of how long it will take to prepare the dish seem to dramatically underestimate reality? We have! And that's for something that is extremely knowable and formulaic — measure, mix, and cook a fixed set of ingredients! When it comes to analytics projects, when you don't know the state of the data, what the data will reveal, and how the scope may shift along the way, answering the question, "How long will this take?" can be downright terrifying. Happy Halloween! Whether you are an in-house analyst or working in an agency setting, though, it's a common and reasonable question to be asked. In this episode Michael, Moe, and Val dive into the topic, including sharing some stories of battle scars and lessons learned along the way. As a bonus, Sensei Michael explains how he uses Aikido on his clients to avoid scope creep! For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.

This book, Alteryx Designer Cookbook, provides over 60 practical and detailed recipes that guide you in conquering data accessibility, preparation, and insights generation through Alteryx Designer. You will learn how to manipulate, blend, and analyze data sources effectively, improving your analytical productivity. What this Book will help me do Master efficient methods for cleaning, preparing, and shaping data accurately. Combine multiple data sources seamlessly using Alteryx Designer's blending tools. Implement essential data transformations such as pivoting and restructuring for analyses. Create reusable, automated solutions for repeated tasks using Alteryx macros. Generate rich, data-driven reports to enhance business intelligence efficiently. Author(s) None Guisande is an experienced data analytics professional with years of hands-on expertise in implementing data workflows using Alteryx Designer. Passionate about simplifying complex operations, None brings a practical approach to teaching, ensuring that readers can apply their skills immediately. Who is it for? This book is ideal for data analysts, professionals in business intelligence, and anyone proficient in Alteryx Designer's basics looking to deepen their understanding. If you aim to enhance your productivity and manual data tasks into efficient automated workflows, this book is a perfect fit.

Discover the utility of your organization’s data with Microsoft Power BI In Beginning Power BI for Business Users: Learning to Turn Data into Insights, accomplished data professional and business intelligence expert Paul Fuller delivers an intuitive and accessible handbook for professionals seeking to use Microsoft’s Power BI to access, analyze, understand, report, and act on the data available to their organizations. In the book, you’ll discover Power BI’s robust feature set, learn to ingest and model data, visualize and report on that data, and even use the DAX scripting language to unlock still more utility from Microsoft’s popular program. Beginning with general principles geared to readers with no or little experience with reporting or data analytics tools, the author walks you through how to manipulate common, publicly available data sources—including Excel files and relational databases. You’ll also learn to: Use the included and tested sample code to work through the helpful examples included by the author Conduct data orchestration and visualization to better understand and gain insights from your data An essential resource for business analysts and Excel power users reaching the limits of that program’s capabilities, Beginning Power BI for Business Users will also benefit data analysts who seek to prepare reports for their organizations using Microsoft’s flexible and intuitive software.

Learn data engineering and modern data pipeline design with AWS in this comprehensive guide! You will explore key AWS services like S3, Glue, Redshift, and QuickSight to ingest, transform, and analyze data, and you'll gain hands-on experience creating robust, scalable solutions. What this Book will help me do Understand and implement data ingestion and transformation processes using AWS tools. Optimize data for analytics with advanced AWS-powered workflows. Build end-to-end modern data pipelines leveraging cutting-edge AWS technologies. Design data governance strategies using AWS services for security and compliance. Visualize data and extract insights using Amazon QuickSight and other tools. Author(s) Gareth Eagar is a Senior Data Architect with over 25 years of experience in designing and implementing data solutions across various industries. He combines his deep technical expertise with a passion for teaching, aiming to make complex concepts approachable for learners at all levels. Who is it for? This book is intended for current or aspiring data engineers, data architects, and analysts seeking to leverage AWS for data engineering. It suits beginners with a basic understanding of data concepts who want to gain practical experience as well as intermediate professionals aiming to expand into AWS-based systems.

Summary

Databases are the core of most applications, whether transactional or analytical. In recent years the selection of database products has exploded, making the critical decision of which engine(s) to use even more difficult. In this episode Tanya Bragin shares her experiences as a product manager for two major vendors and the lessons that she has learned about how teams should approach the process of tool selection.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management Introducing RudderStack Profiles. RudderStack Profiles takes the SaaS guesswork and SQL grunt work out of building complete customer profiles so you can quickly ship actionable, enriched data to every downstream team. You specify the customer traits, then Profiles runs the joins and computations for you to create complete customer profiles. Get all of the details and try the new product today at dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudderstack You shouldn't have to throw away the database to build with fast-changing data. You should be able to keep the familiarity of SQL and the proven architecture of cloud warehouses, but swap the decades-old batch computation model for an efficient incremental engine to get complex queries that are always up-to-date. With Materialize, you can! It’s the only true SQL streaming database built from the ground up to meet the needs of modern data products. Whether it’s real-time dashboarding and analytics, personalization and segmentation or automation and alerting, Materialize gives you the ability to work with fresh, correct, and scalable results — all in a familiar SQL interface. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/materialize today to get 2 weeks free! This episode is brought to you by Datafold – a testing automation platform for data engineers that finds data quality issues before the code and data are deployed to production. Datafold leverages data-diffing to compare production and development environments and column-level lineage to show you the exact impact of every code change on data, metrics, and BI tools, keeping your team productive and stakeholders happy. Datafold integrates with dbt, the modern data stack, and seamlessly plugs in your data CI for team-wide and automated testing. If you are migrating to a modern data stack, Datafold can also help you automate data and code validation to speed up the migration. Learn more about Datafold by visiting dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold Data projects are notoriously complex. With multiple stakeholders to manage across varying backgrounds and toolchains even simple reports can become unwieldy to maintain. Miro is your single pane of glass where everyone can discover, track, and collaborate on your organization's data. I especially like the ability to combine your technical diagrams with data documentation and dependency mapping, allowing your data engineers and data consumers to communicate seamlessly about your projects. Find simplicity in your most complex projects with Miro. Your first three Miro boards are free when you sign up today at dataengineeringpodcast.com/miro. That’s three free boards at dataengineeringpodcast.com/miro. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I'm interviewing Tanya Bragin about her views on the database products market

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? What are the aspects of the database market that keep you interested as a VP of product?

How have your experiences at Elastic informed your current work at Clickhouse?

What are the main product categories for databases today?

What are the industry trends that have the most impact on the development and growth of different product categories? Which categories do you see growing the fastest?

When a team is selecting a database technology for a given task, what are the types of questions that they should be asking? Transactional engines like Postgres, SQL Server, Oracle, etc. were long used

Supercharge your analytics engineering with the power of automated CI checks. Learn how FINN, a global car subscription service, has harnessed the capabilities of automated CI checks to maintain the delicate balance between swift development and robust data pipeline quality as they've scaled their data teams. Dive into insights and strategies to ensure quality without sacrificing speed and discover how to improve your data operations.

Speakers: Chiel Fernhout, Software Engineer, Datafold; Jorrit Posor, Tech Lead Data Engineering, FINN GmbH; Felix Kreitschmann, Senior PM, Data, FINN Auto

Register for Coalesce at https://coalesce.getdbt.com

How a team of eight Analytics Engineers rolled out dbt across Virgin Media O2 to become a data driven company.

Speakers: Oliver Burt, Lead Analytics Engineer, Virgin Media O2; Jason Jones, Analytics Engineering Manager, Virgin Media O2

Register for Coalesce at https://coalesce.getdbt.com

Behind any good DataOps within a Modern Data Stack (MDS) architecture is a solid DevOps design! This is particularly pressing when building an MDS solution at scale, as reliability, quality and availability of data requires a very high degree of process automation while remaining fast, agile and resilient to change when addressing business needs.

While DevOps in Data Engineering is nothing new - for a broad-spectrum solution that includes data warehouse, BI, etc seemed either a bit out of reach due to overall complexity and cost - or simply overlooked due to perceived issues around scaling often attributed to the challenges of automation in CI/CD processes. However, this has been fast changing with tools such as dbt having super cool features which allow a very high degree of autonomy in the CI/CD processes with relative ease, with flexible and cutting edge features around pre-commits, Slim CI, etc.

In this session, Datatonic covers the challenges around building and deploying enterprise-grade MDS solutions for analytics at scale and how they have used dbt to address those - especially around near-complete autonomy to the CI/CD processes!

Speaker: Ash Sultan, Lead Data Architect, Datatonic

Register for Coalesce at https://coalesce.getdbt.com

Hear Benoit Perigaud explain how automation in dbt boosts productivity for large-scale operations. You'll learn how automation is significant throughout the dbt project life cycle, from helping you create projects, to executing rules and building observability on top of all transformations. This session is especially beneficial for data practitioners who manage many dbt projects (into the hundreds!), but it's also great information for anyone who may do so in the future.

Speaker: Benoit Perigaud, Staff Analytics Engineer, dbt Labs

Register for Coalesce at https://coalesce.getdbt.com

dbt packages are libraries for dbt. Packages can produce information about best practice for your dbt project (ex: dbt project evaluator) and cloud warehouse cost overviews. Unfortunately, all theses KPIs are stored in your data warehouse and it can be painful and expensive to create data visualization dashboards. This application build automatically dashboards from dbt packages that you are using. You just need to parameter your dbt Cloud API key - that's it! In this session, you'll learn how.

Speaker: Adrien Boutreau, Head of Analytics Engineers , Infinite Lambda

Register for Coalesce at https://coalesce.getdbt.com

The inside Economics team takes up the gangbuster GDP growth in the third quarter. Marisa walks the group though the GDP identity C+I+G+net exports and concludes that while the report overstates the case, it makes a strong case that the economy is on solid ground. Cris gives Marisa an A+ for her exposition. Good thing given their history.   Follow Mark Zandi @MarkZandi, Cris deRitis @MiddleWayEcon, and Marisa DiNatale on LinkedIn for additional insight.

Questions or Comments, please email us at [email protected]. We would love to hear from you.    To stay informed and follow the insights of Moody's Analytics economists, visit Economic View.

As Joe Reis recently opined, if you want to know what’s next in data engineering, just look at the software engineer. The MDS-in-a-box pattern has been a game changer for applying software engineering principles to local data development– improving the ability to share data, collaborate on modeling work and data analysis the same way we build and share open source tooling.

This panel brings together experts in data engineering, data analytics and software engineering to explore the current state of the pattern, pieces that remain missing today and how emerging tools and data engineering testing capabilities can refine the transition from local development to production workflows.

Speakers: Matt Housley, CTO, Halfpipe Systems; Mehdi Ouazza, Developer Advocate, MotherDuck; Sung Won Chung, Solutions Engineer, Datafold; Louise de Leyritz, Host, The Data Couch podcast

Register for Coalesce at https://coalesce.getdbt.com

Over the past four years, the data team at EQT has leveraged dbt and Snowflake to create a myriad of data products across the company. With a rapidly growing organization and increased demands for timely and accurate data, their immense monolithic dbt repository has become challenging to maintain. Learn about the best practices they are adopting to keep the platform in shape and scale with the business.

Speaker: Erik Lehto, Senior analytics engineer, EQT

Register for Coalesce at https://coalesce.getdbt.com

In analytics, generating a number is the easy part. Proving you got it right is much harder. In this talk, Christine Dixon walks through why you should strive to make your data pipelines reproducible and transparent, to ensure that you can always defend your data. She considers the ways in which dbt makes it easy, but also digs into some difficult technical scenarios and compromises you might need to make.

Speaker: Christine Dixon, Lead Analyst, Mantel Group

Register for Coalesce at https://coalesce.getdbt.com

Two years ago, the data team at Carsales embarked on a journey to modernize their data platform, transforming their approach to analytics, reporting, and data-driven decision making. Navigating through an ever-evolving data landscape, Carsales has prioritized tools and methodologies that boost operational efficiency. This talk delves into their strategic transition towards a decentralized data platform, emphasizing the design to elevate scalability, reliability, and accessibility by embracing best-in-class software engineering practices. By enabling the application of SQL-based infrastructure, they've ensured that even individuals with minimal data engineering background can extract valuable insights while upholding system reliability.

Speaker: Adam Carbone, Data Engineering Lead, Carsales

Register for Coalesce at https://coalesce.getdbt.com

Learn about Watercare's journey in implementing a modern data stack with a focus on self serving analytics in the water industry. The session covers the reasons behind Watercare's decision to implement a modern data stack, the problem of data conformity, and the tools they used to accelerate their data modeling process. Diego also discusses the benefits of using dbt, Snowflake, and Azure DevOps in data modeling. There is also a parallel drawn between analytics and Diego’s connection with jazz music.

Speaker: Diego Morales, Civil Industrial Engineer, Watercare

Register for Coalesce at https://coalesce.getdbt.com

Florence is in the business of healthcare staffing. It is an incredibly outdated industry but with the help of the modern data stack, Florence has been able to make people's lives easier. Here is an overview on the challenges and tactics on how the team at Florence overcame them.

Speakers: Monica Youn, Chief Analytics Officer, Florence; Daniel Ferguson, Data Engineer, Florence

Register for Coalesce at https://coalesce.getdbt.com

Showcasing how analytics engineers can add value to a business by simplifying complex asks into an easy to analyze format. This particular example looks at how we can achieve great insight into our product's performance from a standardized table structure and some clever macros.

Speaker: George Apps, Analytics Engineering, Travelperk

Register for Coalesce at https://coalesce.getdbt.com