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Stop Fighting Scikit-Learn Pipelines: How Metadata Routing Fixes Sample Weights & Groups A couple of months ago, I stumbled upon this video by Vincent D. Warmerdam about metadata routing in scikit-learn. I'll be honest, I had no idea what "metadata routing" even meant, but Vincent's explanation completely changed how I think about building ML pipelines. The video showed me that one of the most frustrating problems in scikit-learn; passing sample weights and groups through complex pipelines finally had an elegant solution. It piqued my curiosity enough that I dove deep into the feature, tested it extensively, and honestly, I was surprised by how little coverage this gets in technical blogs and articles. So I figured, why not write about it myself and share what I learned? If you've ever struggled with imbalanced datasets, grouped cross-validation, or just wanted to pass custom information through your pipelines, this article is for you. Let's start from the very beginning. What is "Metadata" in Machine Learning? Let's start with a concrete example. You're building a credit card fraud detection model with this data: # Your training data X = transaction_features # Amount, merchant, time, location, etc. y = is_fraud # 0 = legitimate, 1 = fraud # But you also have additional information: sample_weights = [ 1.0 , 1.0 , 10.0 , 1.0 , ...] # Fraud transactions weighted 10x customer_ids = [ 101 , 102 , 101 , 103 , ...] # Which customer made each transaction Metadata is the "extra information" beyond your features (X) and labels (y): sample_weight : How important is each transaction? (Fraud = 10x more important) groups : Which customer does each transaction belong to? (For proper cross-validation) Custom metadata : Transaction timestamps, confidence scores, data quality flags, etc. Why Metadata Matters: The Credit Card Fraud Problem Imagine you're building a fraud detection system for a financial company. You have: Imbalanced data : 99% legitimate transactions, 1% fraudulent T

I recently calibrated a recovery-rate model that had only two weak features. Its point accuracy was almost nothing — R² basically zero. I expected its uncertainty estimates to be junk too. They weren't: the 90% conformal prediction intervals covered ~89% of held-out outcomes. Valid, just wide . That surprised me enough to nail it down, because it contradicts a belief a lot of us carry around: "my model isn't accurate, so I can't trust its uncertainty." For split conformal prediction, that's backwards. Here's the precise statement, a runnable demo, and the one caveat that actually bites. Coverage is a property of the procedure, not the model Split conformal prediction gives a distribution-free, finite-sample marginal coverage guarantee : P( Y ∈ Ĉ(X) ) ≥ 1 − α and it holds for any point model, as long as the calibration and test data are exchangeable. The model is a black box. You fit it however you like, then on a held-out calibration set you take the (1−α) quantile of the absolute residuals, and that quantile becomes the half-width of your intervals. Nowhere does that construction require the model to be good. A bad model just has large residuals, so the calibration quantile is large, so the intervals are wide — wide enough to still cover at the stated rate. Accuracy doesn't buy you validity ; it buys you efficiency (narrower intervals at the same coverage). The demo (numbers are reproducible, seed fixed) Same dataset and target, three models from strong to useless, target coverage 90%: model R² marginal coverage mean interval width gradient boosting 0.741 0.895 5.39 weak linear (1 noisy feature) 0.061 0.905 10.39 predict-the-mean −0.000 0.907 10.83 All three land at ~90% coverage. The only thing that changes is width: the good model's intervals are half as wide . That's the whole story in one table — validity is constant, efficiency tracks accuracy. import numpy as np from sklearn.linear_model import LinearRegression from sklearn.ensemble import GradientBoostingReg

Why Your Chinese-Tenured Faculty Resume Won’t Work in US Industry US data scientist hiring managers scan a resume in 7–15 seconds looking for one thing: evidence you can solve business problems with data. A Chinese faculty resume often leads with tenure status, publication counts, and grant amounts—none of which translate to industry value. Worse, the CV-style length and Chinese-specific qualifications (e.g., “Professor of Record,” “National Natural Science Foundation PI”) confuse HR software and recruiters unfamiliar with that system. You need to strip the academic frame and rebuild around what a US data scientist does: clean messy data, build predictive models, deploy to production, and communicate results to non-technical stakeholders. Think of every faculty achievement as raw material you must reframe. Core Rewriting Rules: From Academic to Industry Rule 1: Replace Tenure Rank with a US-Equivalent Data Science Title Do not list “Tenured Associate Professor” unless it is your most recent position at a well-known university (e.g., Peking University, Tsinghua). Instead, use a title that reveals your function: “Senior Data Scientist – Research Computing” or “Lead Data Scientist – Machine Learning Research Lab.” The point is to signal the job function, not the academic rank. Example: Before: “Tenured Associate Professor, School of Computer Science, Fudan University” After: “Senior Data Scientist / Research Lead, Fudan University AI Lab” Rule 2: Translate Every Accomplishment into a Business-Relevant Metric Chinese faculty resumes often say “published 15 papers in top-tier journals” or “secured ¥3M in research funding.” That means nothing to a hiring manager at a fintech startup. Instead, describe what you did with the data and the outcome. Concrete example – before and after: BEFORE (faculty bullet): “Led research project on deep learning for medical image segmentation; published 3 papers in IEEE TMI.” AFTER (industry data scientist bullet): “Built and validated a co

Started looking for a tourism dataset on Kaggle for a new project. Found one with real UNWTO data, but it only went up to 2022 — not enough for what I wanted (post-COVID trends). Then found a better-looking one: "Global Tourism & Travel Trends (2019-2024)," 24 upvotes, great coverage range. Almost picked it on the spot. Then I actually read the full description. Turns out it's synthetic — 10,000 generated records, not real recorded stats. Had to rename the whole project: from "Travel Recovery Analysis" to "Travel Behavior & Satisfaction Trends (2019-2024)" — same dataset, just honest framing. Still great for practice: 33 features, zero nulls, covers spend, satisfaction, eco-choices, transport modes. Anyone else ever almost build a project around the wrong assumption about their data? 👀

Every backend engineer has seen this happen, you build an application on a relational database like MySQL, handling thousands of concurrent transactions effortlessly. Then, the business asks for a real time analytics dashboard. But when you run an aggregation query over historical data, suddenly the database that effortlessly managed live traffic starts thrashing, evicting your working set, and dragging application performance down. This isn't a tuning problem, a missing index, or a badly written query. It’s a fundamental architectural collision. OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) OLTP encompasses nearly every concurrent digital interaction triggered across a distributed system. A user downloading a PDF, a microservice firing an automatic maintenance log, a comment on a social feed these are all transactions. Data engineers rely on OLTP systems (like MySQL or PostgreSQL) to capture these concurrent streams of interactions for creating , updating and deleting records. The Tree Based In-Place Engine To reliably capture massive volumes of transactions without corrupting data or locking up the application, OLTP systems rely on a highly optimized, row oriented architecture built around the B+ Tree. Because they must provide immediate, atomic updates to existing records, transactional databases manage state through a strict sequence of physical tree traversal and in-memory page mutation: The B+ Tree Indexing: When a transaction reads or updates id: 1, the engine traverses a B+ Tree from the root, through the branch nodes, directly to the specific physical leaf node holding that row. This O(\log n) traversal guarantees a fast, isolated point-lookup. It ensures the application always hits the single version of the row without scanning irrelevant data. The Buffer Pool & In-Place Updates: OLTP systems perform in place updates. The database pulls the exact page containing id: 1 from the physical disk into memory (the Buffer Pool). The specific row is mutated directly in RAM

When I first started exploring Machine Learning, I made the same mistake most beginners do — I jumped straight into neural networks and model training without really understanding the Python underneath. I'd copy code from tutorials, get it running, and have zero idea why it worked. Then I started going through a structured Python-for-ML curriculum — and everything changed. This post is a distillation of that journey. If you're a CS student or early-career developer who wants to work seriously in ML/AI, here's the complete Python foundation you need — with the why , not just the what . Why Python Specifically? (It's Not Just Hype) Python isn't the fastest language. C++ blows it out of the water on speed — and I've personally used C++ for packet-capture modules in one of my ML projects. But Python dominates ML for one reason: the ecosystem . NumPy, Pandas, PyTorch, TensorFlow, Scikit-learn, Hugging Face — all Python-first. You don't choose Python for ML. The field chose it for you. Stage 1: Python Basics — The Foundation You Can't Skip Before you touch any ML library, you need these locked in. Variables and Data Types Python is dynamically typed, which feels nice at first but will bite you during data preprocessing if you're not careful. # These are all valid — Python infers the type name = " Parth " score = 8.97 is_enrolled = True year = 2025 For ML, the types that matter most are int , float , bool , and str — and knowing when Python silently converts between them (type coercion) can save you hours of debugging. Loops and Conditions — Your Data Iteration Backbone grades = [ 8.5 , 7.9 , 9.1 , 6.8 , 8.97 ] for g in grades : if g >= 8.5 : print ( f " Distinction: { g } " ) elif g >= 7.0 : print ( f " First Class: { g } " ) else : print ( f " Pass: { g } " ) Simple? Yes. But this exact pattern — iterate over a collection, branch on conditions — is the mental model for 80% of data cleaning code you'll write later. Functions and Lambda Expressions Functions are how you st

SaaS teams using AI-driven experimentation platforms (also called A/B testing automation or CRO...

We train a model on handwritten digit classification. 99% accuracy . Then we train the same model on a new task — say, fashion item recognition. We go back and test it on digits. 34% accuracy . It has completely forgotten. Not gradually, not partially — almost entirely. What Just Happened? We trained a CNN on MNIST digits — 99.2% accuracy . After fine‑tuning on Fashion MNIST, it reached 91.1% accuracy . But when re‑evaluated on MNIST, accuracy collapsed to 33.9% . This collapse is catastrophic forgetting : the model’s weights shifted to optimize for the new task, erasing the old solution. Why did training on more data make the model worse at something it already knew? MNIST is handwritten digits (0–9). Fashion MNIST is clothing items like shirts and shoes. Both are 28×28 grayscale images, but the tasks are distinct. Why Does It Happen? The core issue is that the model relies on the same set of weights for both tasks. There is no separation or dedicated memory; every parameter is shared . When training shifts from Task A ( MNIST digits ) to Task B ( Fashion MNIST ), gradient descent simply minimizes the loss on the data it sees at that moment. It has no awareness that Task A ever existed. In the loss landscape, imagine two parabolic bowls: one for Task A and one for Task B. The optimum for Task A lies at θ A ∗ ​ , while Task B's optimum is at θ B ∗ ​ . As training on Task B progresses, the weights θ move towards θ B ∗ ​ . This movement inevitably raises the loss for Task A because its minimum is left behind. The root cause is the shared weight space. Gradient descent is a stateless optimizer; it only follows the current gradient signal. Since the minima for Task A and Task B are far apart, there is no single configuration of θ that satisfies both tasks simultaneously. This is why catastrophic forgetting occurs. Weight space can be visualized as an N-dimensional space, where each axis corresponds to one parameter. Every point in this space represents a full set of wei

I recently built GeoPrizm , a free and open-source dashboard for tracking bilateral relations through global news event signals. The idea is simple: instead of reading dozens of headlines every day and trying to guess whether a relationship is improving or worsening, can we turn public news event data into a readable trend signal? GeoPrizm is my attempt at that. Website: https://www.geoprizm.com/en GitHub: https://github.com/Haullk/relationship-temperature The problem International relations are usually discussed through headlines, speeches, official statements, and expert commentary. That is valuable, but it creates a few practical problems: It is hard to compare country pairs on the same scale. A single headline can feel more important than it really is. Readers often see conclusions before they see the underlying signals. Most non-specialists do not have time to follow every event in detail. I wanted a lightweight way to answer one question: Based on public news event signals, is this bilateral relationship trending more cooperative, neutral, or tense? Data source: GDELT GeoPrizm uses the GDELT global news event database. GDELT monitors global news coverage and converts news reports into structured event records. These records include fields such as: actor countries event date CAMEO event category GoldsteinScale value number of mentions number of articles source information For GeoPrizm, the key idea is to focus on events where two countries appear as actors, then aggregate the cooperation or conflict signals over time. From event signals to an index Each bilateral pair is converted into a 0-100 relationship index. The midpoint is 50. Above 50 means the recent signal is more cooperative or favorable. Around 50 means the signal is relatively neutral or mixed. Below 50 means the recent signal is more tense or conflict-heavy. The rough process is: Select recent GDELT events for a country pair. Keep events where both actors are present and the GoldsteinScale value is

If you scrape Weibo's hot-search board you get a snapshot: ~50 trending topics, ranked, right now. That's table stakes — and on its own it's almost useless as a signal. The value isn't what is trending; it's what's moving : which topic just jumped 30 places in 20 minutes, which is decaying, which is brand-new this hour. That's velocity , and velocity is where the signal lives — for brand-crisis teams, consumer-trend desks, and anyone modelling attention in China. The catch: a single scrape can't tell you velocity. You have to diff the board against its own past, reliably, run after run. That's a stateful pipeline, and it has a few non-obvious gotchas. Here's the shape of the problem and how to handle it. Why a snapshot isn't enough Rank-right-now tells you nothing about trajectory. "#7" could be a topic on its way to #1 or one fading out of the top 50 — same row, opposite meaning. To act on a trend you need the derivative : direction, speed, and how long it's been climbing. None of that is in a single pull. The trending-delta problem Three things make "just diff the board" harder than it looks: Key by identity, not position. You can't track a topic by its rank — rank is the thing that changes. Key by the topic itself (its text/keyword) or your deltas are nonsense. State has to survive between runs. A scheduled scrape is stateless by default — each run starts cold. To compute "this rose 12 places since 30 minutes ago," you must persist the previous board and reload it next run, keyed so independent schedules don't overwrite each other. The board churns. Topics appear, peak, and fall off. You want each tagged new / rising / falling / steady / dropped , plus how long it's been on the board and its running peak — none of which exist in the raw snapshot. How to handle it (the pattern) current = pull_board () # [{topic, rank, heat}, ...] previous = load_state ( key ) # durable store that persists across runs for t in current : prev = previous . get ( t . topic ) # match o

How I got here On principle, you will never catch me parading myself as a some sort of expert data scientist. Technically, that's what I do in my day job, but I know I still have so much to learn because the field is broad, and to truly become expert requires dangerously ambitious levels of work ethic. I think I'm a functional data scientist who learns more as I encounter new problems daily. I'm writing this piece because in the last week or two, precisely three people have asked me questions related to transitioning into data science. As such, I thought to unify my thoughts around the topic so that I can refer anyone else who asks here--if anyone else ever asks. This article assumes you're already familiar with some of the data science entails such as data analysis, model training, prediction, etc, so I will not be doing a lecture series, just addressing some of the disconnects I have observed in conversation with people looking to transition to the field. Initial Excitement In 2026, it's easy to see what claude or chatGPT is doing and go "What sorcery is this? I must learn this trick!" and then reach out to the closest person you know who has ever mentioned anything about data or machine learning to find out how you can transition into AI. First of all, transitioning into "AI" is such a broad way to look at it. It is analogous to saying "I want to emigrate to Africa, show me how". But that's forgivable too. To cut short your initial excitement, or maybe redirect it, playing with a locally hosted LLM or making API calls to the DeepSeek endpoint is not data science, or machine learning or "AI". It's coding. And if you want to go down that route, you're better of focusing on software engineering. I say this because when you work with LLMs, the finished models to be specific, it's like using any other SaaS API out there. The difference being that you're interacting with a much less deterministic interface. But the rest of the work you do around it is pretty much a det

When I started learning Excel as part of my Data Science & Analytics course, I assumed it was just a tool for creating tables and performing basic calculations. After spending a week exploring its features, I quickly realized that Excel is much more powerful than I thought. Almost every organization generates data. Businesses track sales, schools monitor student performance, hospitals manage patient records, and marketers analyze campaign results. Before data can be analyzed, it needs to be organized, cleaned, and summarized—and that's where Excel comes in. In this article, I'll share some of the Excel concepts I've learned so far and how they're used in real-world data analysis. Understanding the Excel Workspace Before working with data, it's important to understand the basic structure of Excel. When you open Excel, you're working inside a workbook . A workbook can contain multiple worksheets (often called sheets), which help organize different sets of data. At the top of the screen is the Ribbon , which contains tabs such as Home, Insert, Page Layout, Formulas, Data, and View. The Ribbon acts like a control center where you can access Excel's tools and features. Rows run horizontally and are identified by numbers, while columns run vertically and are identified by letters. The intersection of a row and column is called a cell , where data is entered. At first, all these parts seemed overwhelming, but after using Excel regularly, navigating through them has become much easier. The Different Types of Data in Excel One of the first things I learned is that not all data is the same. Excel commonly works with: Text data (names, product categories, locations) Numeric data (sales figures, quantities, prices) Date and time data (order dates, deadlines) Logical data (TRUE or FALSE values) Understanding data types is important because Excel treats each type differently when performing calculations and analysis. Number Formats Matter More Than I Expected Another concept that

Before this week, I thought Excel was just a fancy calculator with boxes. But after three days of my Data Science & Analytics course, I realise I was wrong. Really wrong. Excel is a spreadsheet tool used by millions of people from small business owners to data analysts at giant companies. And the best part? You don’t need to be a programmer to use it. You just need to know a few tricks. Here’s how Excel helps solve real-world problems using exactly what I learned in Week 1. 3 Real-World Ways Excel Is Used Business decisions with logic Managers use IF() statements to answer yes/no questions. Example: =IF(Sales>1000, "Bonus", "Needs Improvement"). One cell can decide who gets paid more. Cleaning messy data Real data is never clean. Marketing teams use Remove Duplicates, Find & Replace, and Text to Columns to fix hundreds of messy rows in seconds. No manual typing. Tracking deadlines and ages HR teams use DATEDIF() to calculate employee ages or years of service. TODAY() and NOW() keep reports automatically updated. No more “oh, I forgot to update the date.” 3 Excel Features I Learned This Week Remove Duplicates – One click, and Excel deletes repeated rows. Saved me from sending the same customer email twice. IFERROR() – Hides ugly errors like #DIV/0! and shows something friendly instead (e.g., “Check data”). Your boss will thank you. Sort & Filter – With AutoFilter, I can find all sales above $500 in one second. Then Custom Sort lets me sort by date and region together. My personal reflection Honestly? Learning Excel has changed how I see data. I used to look at a messy spreadsheet and feel lost. Now I see Remove Duplicates, Text to Columns, and TRIM() as tiny tools that bring order to chaos. Data isn’t scary anymore. It’s just a puzzle and Excel gives me the pieces. I’m only one week in. But I already feel like a junior data analyst in training.

Data analysis is at the heart of how we spot patterns and improve systems today. Tools like Python, SQL, Power BI, and Tableau are everywhere in the data world, but Excel has held its ground as the starting point for anyone getting into data work, and there is a reason for that. What is Excel? Excel is a spreadsheet built on a grid of rows and columns. You use it to organize, format, and calculate data. For analysts it is where messy raw data gets sorted out, numbers get worked through, and everything gets turned into something that actually makes sense to look at. Ways Excel is Used in Real-World Data Analysis 1. Data Cleaning Raw data is almost never clean. Names are misspelled, IDs get duplicated, spacing is off, values go missing. None of that is unusual, it is just the reality of working with real data. Before any analysis happens the data has to be honest, because if the data is wrong the results will be too. Functions like PROPER() and TRIM() are some of the basic tools that help get data into a state where you can actually work with it. 2. Financial Reporting Every business, big or small, needs to know where the money is going. Excel makes that straightforward. SUM() adds up a range of numbers, AVERAGE() finds the mean, and once the calculations are done the data can be turned into charts and dashboards that tell the story of the business clearly. Not everyone in the room is an analyst, but everyone can read a chart. 3. Business Decision Making Clean data presented well becomes a decision making tool. What do customers want? What is working? What needs to change? Sorting figures from highest to lowest or filtering by region can take thousands of rows and turn them into something focused and answerable. That is really what data is for, helping people make better calls. Excel Features I Have Learned and How They Apply Three features that have stood out to me are conditional formatting, data validation, and cell referencing. Conditional formatting highlights ce

Alzheimer's disease affects over 55 million people worldwide, yet the precise molecular changes happening inside individual brain cells remain poorly understood. I wanted to dig into that question - not at the tissue level, but at single-cell resolution. So I built a full scRNA-seq analysis pipeline in Python using Scanpy, working with a publicly available dataset of 63,608 nuclei from human prefrontal cortex tissue (sourced from CZ CELLxGENE). The donors spanned three Braak stages: 0 (cognitively normal), 2 (early Alzheimer's), and 6 (severe Alzheimer's). Here's what I found and how I found it. The Dataset The data came from a study on the molecular characterisation of selectively vulnerable neurons in AD. It covers the superior frontal gyrus, a prefrontal region known to be hit hard by neurodegeneration - and includes seven major brain cell types: Glutamatergic neurons GABAergic neurons Oligodendrocytes OPCs (oligodendrocyte precursor cells) Astrocytes Microglia Endothelial cells 31,997 genes. 63,608 cells. Three disease stages. A lot to work with. The Pipeline 1. Quality Control No dataset is clean out of the box. I filtered cells to keep only those with between 200 and 6,000 detected genes, and excluded anything with more than 20% mitochondrial gene content (high mitochondrial reads usually signal a dying or damaged cell). This removed around 2,809 low-quality cells. 2. Normalisation Library sizes were normalised to 10,000 counts per cell, followed by log1p transformation, standard practice that makes cells comparable regardless of how deeply they were sequenced. I then identified 5,607 highly variable genes to focus the downstream analysis. 3. Dimensionality Reduction PCA (50 components) → neighbourhood graph (10 neighbours, 20 PCs) → UMAP embedding. The UMAP is where the biology starts to become visible. All seven cell types separated into distinct clusters, with clear separation between neuronal subtypes and glial populations. 4. Differential Expression For t

Introduction Excel is a spreadsheet application developed by Microsoft that helps users organize, analyze and visualize data. It is used by businesses, organizations, researchers and students worldwide because it makes working with data easier and more efficient. Business Decision Making One of the ways Excel is used in real-world data analysis is in supporting business decision-making. Companies collect data such as customer information, financial transactions and sales records. Excel helps in organizing and analyzing this data using tools such as formulas and PivotTables. This makes it easier to identify trends and patterns in business performance, such as which products to stock and when to restock them. For example, a supermarket can analyze the monthly sales in Excel to identify the best-selling products and ensure that they remain in stock. Marketing Performance Excel is also used to analyze marketing performance. Businesses use it to track data from marketing campaigns such as website visits, social media engagement and sales conversions. This information is organized using charts and reports, which help evaluate which strategies are producing the best results. This allows companies to allocate their resources more effectively and improve future campaigns based on data rather than assumptions. As a result, Excel plays an important role in helping businesses understand their customers and improve the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. Financial Reporting Excel is widely used in financial reporting. It helps businesses to organize and analyze financial statements such as income statements, cash flow reports and balance sheets. It is also used to record transactions, calculate totals, and generate summaries that show the financial health of the business. By using built-in formulas and functions, accountants can quickly compute profits, expenses, taxes and forecasts with a high level of accuracy. Excel also allows the creation of financial charts and dashb

Introduction In today's fast-paced business environments, data is considered the cornerstone of decision-making, policy formulation, and other organizational needs. MS Excel is a robust spreadsheet developed by Microsoft for organizing, analyzing, and visualizing data in rows and columns. In the data science and analytics domain, MS Excel is critical for analyzing and managing data to generate insights that enhance decision-making. Excel's polarity is characterized by its ease of use, flexibility, automation, and visualization. Ways Excel Is Used in Real-World Data Analysis Across the data science and analytics domain, MS Excel is frequently employed in the following ways; a) Data Cleaning and Preprocessing At the beginning of every data science and analytics project, data cleaning is required, and MS Excel is the primary tool. Typical Excel features and functions applied during data cleaning include Text to Columns, Remove Duplicates, Find and Replace, and Power Query. b) Exploratory Data Analysis Before performing data science and analytics activities, it is crucial to understand the dataset at hand, its structure, and trends. MS Excel features Pivot Tables, Pivot Charts, and Slicers that provide instant aggregation, sorting, and visualizations. c) Data Analysis and Reporting Modern organizations and businesses operate based on insights generated from data. MS Excel features such as pivot tables, charts, and conditional formatting help data analysts analyze and visualize data for clear, actionable insights that enhance decision-making. MS Excel Features or Formulas The typical MS Excel features and formulas employed in the data science and analytics domain include the following. Data Cleaning Functions Function Purpose Example Result UPPER() Converts text to uppercase =UPPER("john") JOHN LOWER() Converts text to lowercase =LOWER("JOHN") john PROPER() Capitalizes the first letter of each word =PROPER("john doe") John Doe TRIM() Removes extra spaces from text =TRIM(

Introduction A traditional database. That is what many who have not really interacted with Excel to a great extent would define it as in its most basic form. Not that they are wrong, only that is the scope their utilization of Excel covers. Mostly record keeping, basic operations, and data representation. But for those whose utilization scope of Excel is broader, we definitely know better. This underestimation of Excel is a grave mistake for anyone considering themselves as tech-oriented, especially for anyone dealing with data operations, be it simple record keeping or complex concepts involving data. What is Excel A spreadsheet program or tool that facilitates data organization, analysis, and visualization through mathematical operations, chart creation, and building financial models. Real-world application of Excel in Data Analytics Reporting and visualisation Excel facilitates data representation in the form of charts(bar charts, pie charts, line graphs) and dashboards. Businesses and organisations utilize this to get an organised, more insightful, and simplified view and report of their raw data. Financial Accounting Excel's provision for mathematical operations, functions, and formulas in analysis facilitates financial accounting. Balance sheets and income statements preparation, budgeting, and expense tracking are just some of the ways Excel can be used in accounting. Decision-Making Businesses and organisations heavily rely on analysis to support their decision-making. Excel helps in the analysis through different data metrics comparisons, e.g., sales across seasons and locations, forecasting, and tracking key performance indicators. This helps businesses make the best decisions based on the insights gathered from the analysis. Beginner Excel Features and Formulas for Data Analysis Learnt so far Sort and Filter By applying the Filter feature for each column, data in specific columns can not only be sorted from newest to oldest, but also be filtered based on

Key Use Cases Power BI Visual Monitoring can be used for: power bi visual monitoring power bi report visual monitoring visual regression testing for Power BI power bi screenshot monitoring monitoring Power BI visuals visual monitoring for Power BI Report Server automated Power BI dashboard validation visual correctness control for BI reports Power BI Visual Monitoring: Automatically Detecting Broken Visuals in Power BI Reports In large Power BI environments, analytics teams often face the problem of silent regressions : even minor changes in data or models can break individual visuals without any obvious errors. Report owners frequently don’t notice that a visual has stopped rendering or is showing incorrect data — this can happen due to changes in data source structure, access rights, deleted fields, broken measures, or refresh failures. Manually checking hundreds of report pages across multiple dashboards in such conditions is extremely inefficient and nearly impossible. We, a team of BI developers and analysts, encountered this pain point during a large analytics implementation project and decided to create a solution for automated Power BI visual monitoring . Project Source Code: GitHub: https://github.com/svergio/Power-bi-report-visual-monitoring Documentation: https://svergio.github.io/Power-bi-report-visual-monitoring/ Wiki: https://github.com/svergio/Power-bi-report-visual-monitoring/wiki Why Standard Power BI Tools Don’t Solve the Problem Standard Power BI tools such as Usage Metrics and Performance Analyzer help analyze report usage and performance but do not detect visual issues. For example, built-in usage metrics show “how those dashboards and reports are being used” — number of views, popular reports, and who is viewing them. These metrics are important for assessing analytics adoption, but they say nothing about whether the visuals themselves are displaying correctly. Similarly, Performance Analyzer shows load times for each visual, helping identify s

Introduction Excel is one of the most used tools for data analysis. It allows beginners like myself to easily clean, organize, analyze and visualize data.Excel enables users to work with large datasets and extract meaningful insights without requiring advanced technical skills. What is Excel Excel is a spreadsheet that allows you to collect, organize, analyze, calculate, and visualize data efficiently.Despite the emergence of other data analysis tools like SQL and Power BI, Excel remains one of the most widely used tools for both personal and professional data management.This can be credited to its ease of access, learning, and use. Ways Excel is used in real-world data analysis This week, I had the opportunity to explore how Excel is used in real-world data analysis.I discovered that Excel is not just a basic spreadsheet tool, but a powerful application that helps make sense of data and support decision-making. Data organization and cleaning Excel is used to structure raw data, remove duplicates, and fix errors. This improves data quality, making it easier to analyze and more reliable for decision-making.This improves data quality, making it easier to analyze and more reliable for decision-making. Financial Excel is commonly used in finance to create budgets, calculate profits and losses, and monitor expenses.It helps organizations keep accurate financial records and understand their financial situation. Business decision-making Businesses use Excel to track sales, compare performance over time, and identify trends.This helps managers understand what is working well and what needs improvement. Excel features and formulas In just a week, I have learned several Excel formulas that simplify data management and make working with data more efficient. SUM function The SUM function is used to add a range of values together in Excel, making it one of the most essential tools for quick calculations.It's used to automatically add a range of numerical values together, elimina