This article will take a look at how two Microsoft 365 applications, MyAnalytics and Excel, help users perform various advanced analytics tasks.
What is Advanced Analytics?
Advanced Analytics is the process of analyzing business information or data using statistics, machine learning, process automation, and predictive modeling techniques. This form of data science is often used for discovering, interpreting, and analyzing patterns within data that may be significant or meaningful, as well as to anticipate the likelihood of potential events occurring in the future. Forecasting a business’s trends or possible outcomes based on past and current practices provides organizations with a more robust understanding of their organization, as well as its potential. The insights drawn from advanced analytics can be used to help make more effective business decisions.
Using MyAnalytics for Advanced Analytics
MyAnalytics is an application that was designed to help employees and managers better manage their time. Users can keep track of their productivity using various measures that evaluate how much time is spent working late, responding to emails in Outlook, or in meetings. This app provides a convenient and helpful way for employees to be more mindful of how they use their time at work with the ultimate goal of increasing efficiency and productivity during work hours so that tasks do not have to be completed during designated non-work timeslots.
In addition to the benefits for individual employees who use this app, MyAnalaytics can also be used by teams to provide insights about when and why productivity may lag in some instances, or with some employees. Then, solutions based on the data can be used to improve the overall productivity of the team, and ultimately, the organization. In addition, dashboards and reports that indicate employee productivity help managers collect data to evaluate continuous employee performance and how best to optimize staff configurations.
MyAnalytics can be used for evaluating continuous performance, managing talent or human capital, and establishing optimal staff configurations. If one team is being exceptionally productive, managers can apply the data-driven findings from MyAnalaytics to further study various aspects of this productivity, such as if this team is collaborating mostly internally or with other departments. They can then use this team’s productivity as a model that can be used for other teams.
How Does MyAnalytics Perform Advanced Analytics?
There are four sections to a MyAnalaytics dashboard, each of which provide data-driven insights about individual employee work habits over the course of the past month:
- Collaboration conveys information about how productive the time spent collaborating with other employees was. It displays how many hours an employee spent in meetings, fielding phone calls, emailing, or chatting. Additionally, meeting habit statistics are also included in this section, pertaining to the number of last-minute meetings that were added to the schedule, as well as the number of online meetings an employee was able to attend on time.
- Focus indicates the amount of time that’s left for an employee to perform other work tasks once other time commitments like answering calls, responding to emails, and attending meetings are subtracted from the day. Employees can select the “Make More Time to Focus” link if they wish to improve their productivity during this time. The app then uses AI technology to help the employee decide how much time to devote to tasks, as well as when to block off time chunks for maximum productivity.
- Wellbeing is designed to improve an employee’s work/life balance. This section offers statistics based on the number of quiet hours (time outside a normal workday) that are available, as well as times during which these quiet hours were disrupted by work tasks. A pie chart presents a clear overview of all disruptions that occurred, which can be used to help them ensure that they are getting enough work done during scheduled working hours so that they can have periods of disconnect from work for long enough to recharge.
- Network offers insights into how often an employee collaborated with others over the course of a month, as well as during the entire year. Various forms of collaboration are accounted for in this section and can be sorted into categories like active, new, important, or external.
Using Excel for Advanced Analytics
Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet application designed to help users perform calculations and computations, as well as create visual representations of data. This widely used application works on both Mac and Windows operating systems. It includes a series of cells, which are arranged into rows and columns. After data is entered into Excel, this app organizes it and can perform a variety of manipulations to the values, as well as calculations based on the numbers. It can then provide a visual representation of the data in forms like histograms, charts, or bar graphs.
This spreadsheet application is hugely popular; over half a billion people worldwide rely on it for their advanced analytic functions.
How Does Excel Perform Advanced Analytics?
Excel offers users hundreds of tools and features for organizing, managing, analyzing, and visualizing data, many of which rely on advanced analytics:
- Excel learns users’ patterns the more they work with this spreadsheet software, which helps users more efficiently organize data and save valuable time.
- It’s easy to sort, filter, and adjust data when working in Excel. Even for those who don’t know how to code, Excel has options for cutting and pasting data, as well as for executing drag-and-drop functions.
- Excel’s automation capabilities help cut down on the busywork of manually formatting and revising values. It is able to reformat cells, update values, and run macros.
- Power Query, a business intelligence tool, provides Excel users with a way to import data from various sources, then clean and reshape it as necessary. Users can establish a query one time, then execute a simple refresh to reuse it. This powerful tool is able to import and cleanse millions of rows, which can then be used for analysis. No knowledge of coding is needed to use this tool; instead, Power Query’s editor keeps a record of all the steps that were performed, then transforms them into M code.
- Automation allows Excel users to transfer information from spreadsheets into graphs or charts so that they can have a visual representation of important data. It also eliminates the errors that often correspond with the process of transferring data from other sources onto a spreadsheet.
- Excel uses automation to encrypt, compress, and transfer data. This ensures that collaborations are safe.
Although MyAnalytics and Excel perform vastly different functions and provide users with different sorts of data-driven insights, both of these Microsoft 365 applications rely on automated technology to provide users with advanced analytic capabilities.
Start Learning Excel with Hands-On Classes
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You can also browse over 400 in-person Microsoft Office classes in a city near you to find local study options in Excel and other Office 365 apps.