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Oct 19, 2022 · 8 min read · Listen

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10 Excel Project Ideas to Add to Your Data

Science Portfolio
Microsoft Excel is a very powerful tool to leverage when working with data. It has a
well-established reputation in the data science community and mastering its
advanced functionalities, such as VLOOKUP, Pivot Tables, and Power Query is still a
top priority for aspiring professionals in the field.

So, if you already have experience in the software but need inspiration on how to
use it to enhance your portfolio, keep reading to discover 10 Excel spreadsheet
project ideas you can start working on today!

10 Excel Project Ideas for Your Data Science Portfolio

1. Creating a personal spending budget

2. Import/Transform Data to Excel via Power Query

3. Experiment with Pivot Tables

4. Utilize VLOOKUP

5. Create a Tree Map

6. Create a Histogram

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7. Create a Scatterplot

8. Make a Forecast model in Excel

9. Manage a Data Model

10. Develop an Interactive Dashboard

1. Create a Personal Spending Budget

The best data science projects are rooted in identifying an area where value can be
added by your analysis. Developing a personal daily/weekly/monthly budget in Excel
is a great first step that allows for real-world application. A way to expand on this is
to have variable inputs that can be adjusted to change the target budget value.

2. Import/Transform Data to Excel via Power Query

A great opportunity to experiment with obtaining data from various sources is by
creating a workbook data connection in Excel via Power Query. Power Query can be
used to import data from sources such as text files, online services, and databases.
Once data is imported you can perform additional steps beginning with renaming
columns and changing data types, and eventually moving on to advanced
techniques such as adding conditional formatting, creating Pivot Tables, as well as
combining different functionalities like the often paired INDEX and MATCH to
retrieve specific data values. Overall, an Excel project centered on importing and
transforming information is an excellent way to practice data collection, and
cleaning, widely applicable in data science.

3. Experiment with Pivot Tables

Pivot Tables are an essential tool for Data Analytics in Excel. They allow you to
summarize data while easily highlighting points of interest.

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The above is an example of a Pivot Table created from a dataset containing

information on the top 1000 highest-grossing Hollywood films. With it, we’ve
obtained the top 15 movies in terms of Domestic Sales quickly and efficiently. This
type of analysis can be done on any dataset that interests you.

4. Utilize VLOOKUP
VLOOKUP works well when trying to create new, smaller tables from a large dataset.
It’s a great function that allows you to find more targeted, cleaner data to work with.
Using VLOOKUP will allow you to make information easier to analyze and will help
in many of the projects further down this list.

Check out our VLOOKUP COLUMN and ROW tutorial for more details on how to use
VLOOKUP to handle large data tables with ease.

5. Create a Tree Map

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A tree map is a data visualization chart that is often used in dashboards. Excel offers
a great opportunity to become familiar with this tool and to apply your skills in
practice. With Excel you can develop multiple Tree Maps that highlight different
points of interest in your data, all the while adjusting formatting and customizing
the chart to your liking. The example below is based on the aforementioned dataset
containing information about the top 1000 highest-grossing Hollywood films.

6. Create a Histogram
Histograms are tools used in statistical data analysis whenever we want to visualize
the normality of the distribution of data. A potential Excel project involving
histograms could take as its starting point researching different types of real-world
data (such as the outcome of rolling dice or flipping a coin) and utilizing a histogram
to visualize their distributions and determining what they would be classified as. An
example of this would be the below visualization which was created using the
RANDBETWEEN function in Excel to simulate 1000 coin flips.

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After analyzing the Histogram, we can establish that a coin flip follows a Binomial
Distribution logic due to there only being two possible outcomes, heads or tails.

7. Create a Scatter Plot

Scatter plots fall in line with contingency tables, and histograms as being very useful
in statistical data analysis. They are an often-used tool for visualizing the
relationship between two variables in data. Like other fun Excel projects on this list,
this one would work best with a dataset that holds particular interest to you. Once
you have picked a dataset, it’s time to start charting relationships between variables
of interest and digging into what you find. An example of a scatter plot made from
the previously mentioned top 1000 highest grossing Hollywood films dataset can be
found below.

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8. Make a Forecast Model in Excel

Excel has a built-in forecast functionality that can be used to create a prediction on
time-related data such as the number of sales of specific products. In order to create
a forecast in Excel, you’ll need to select data with a date tied to it and the
corresponding values for that date. Forecasting is an area of particular interest for
data analysts and experimenting with it in Excel is a chance to get business-
applicable experience. Excel also allows you to customize your forecast and set
parameters such as the confidence interval, seasonality pattern, and timeline range.

9. Manage a Data Model

Excel enables you to integrate data from multiple tables which can then be
connected by defining relationships. An Excel data model is in some ways similar to
a relational database and is perfect for visualizing and extracting insights from
several different sets of related data. The diagram view in particular is a wonderful
way to see the relationships in the model you create.

10. Develop an Interactive Dashboard

The final suggestion on this list is a way to combine everything else we covered so
far into one extensive Excel project. Each of the previous examples can be practiced

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in isolation, but it would also be beneficial to use them together to develop a

dashboard for displaying your data and highlighting your data science capabilities in
Excel. In order to make a dashboard interactive, it needs to have elements of Pivot
Tables, VLOOKUP, relational data, and the chart types mentioned earlier. Adding
Slicers to the worksheet will enable users to select their own filters and can ensure
that an Excel dashboard is able to rival one built in Tableau or Power BI. Moreover, it
comes with the added bonus of being in a format that more people are familiar
with, as Excel is more widely used than those tools.

Q&As

What is an Excel project?

Excel projects come in different shapes and sizes, but what’s common about them is
that they involve manipulating data in a spreadsheet format with the intention to
extract value from it. In fact, the best Excel projects are those that strive to make a
measurable difference in the way something such as a business metric, or a
personal budget, is understood and managed. That being said, the best data science
projects are always passion projects, so take care to pick data sets that interest you
and that are of value to you before you start pondering the business applications of
your project. Excel is uniquely positioned to be both a powerful business
intelligence tool and an excellent starting point for data analysts looking to acquire
practical skills. Most of the software’s advanced functionalities find regular usage in
the corporate world, with some even finding their way into predictive analytics
solutions.

What projects can I use Excel for?

Data scientists looking to expand their project portfolio can use Excel to collect,
clean, transform and visualize data. The skills you will gain from executing these
projects can be easily transferred to more high-responsibility tasks, such as
removing duplicate data from a dataset, preprocessing data so it’s ready for analysis,
as well as drawing connections between data points and illustrating your insights.
Even though it has a low barrier to entry, Excel is a powerful piece of software and
its advanced applications extend all the way to the most cutting edge predictive
analytics techniques, such as Machine Learning. In that sense, getting a firm grasp

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on the most common functions in Excel such as Pivot Tables, VLOOKUP, and its
visualization tools, certainly pays off in the long-run, once you start building up on
those fundamentals and expanding your knowledge beyond Excel.

How do I build a project in Excel?

Building a project in Excel follows three easy steps:

1. Identify the area of your project and the desired outcomes,

2. Find the best functionalities to execute your project,

3. Create and share your exciting new project.

The most important thing when starting off with any Excel project is to identify the
range, scope, and potential value of your idea: do you want to create something fun
and exciting for your personal use or something professional to add to your data
science portfolio? Are you trying to solve a particular problem, or are you just
playing around? How much time, effort, and money will it take to complete this
project? What will its benefits be?

After getting those out of the way, you can look into finding appropriate data sets to
work with and researching the functionalities you will be using. Some projects can
be executed on a 10-by-10 spreadsheet with very basic Excel knowledge, but for
others you will be working with huge amounts of data and leveraging advanced
functions.

Finally, once your project is done, don’t forge to share it with the world. Add it to
your Kaggle profile and plug it into all your data science job applications. After all, a
project is only as important and valuable as you make it out to be!

Data Science Project Ideas Excel Projects Data Science Projects

10 Excel Project Ideas for Data Scientists: Next Steps
Datathat
Now Science
youPortfolio
have several projects to choose from, the next step would be to start
your journey in performing data analytics in Excel. Explore more of the advanced
functionalities of the software, such as the INDIRECT function that you can combine
with VLOOKUP to create dynamic lookup tables. Or if you’re confident in your Excel
skills, dive into the ML capabilities of the software and take your portfolio of

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projects to the next level with our Machine

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Originally published at https://365datascience.com on June 02, 2022.
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