Making Sense of Data

This winter I saw a few tweets about a course that Google was going to be offering. It was called Making Sense of Data (you can check it out here: https://datasense.withgoogle.com/preview). I wasn't really sure who they were targeting. Clearly, they weren't going after the most technical of folks, but outside of that it wasn't completely clear. So I decided to take the course.

My summary is that the course was valuable and taught me some things about Google's Fusion Tables product, but that the essence of the course was for someone new to data or using data in a secondary function in their day to day work.

The course started on 3/18 and it was set up to be an introductory course to data. It ended up being pretty basic for someone who works with data each day. Here are a few things covered in the course:

• Data process
• Data anatomy
• Data structure and cleansing
• Fusion Tables (Google Product, see screen shot below)
• Visualizing data
• Analyzing data

It does all of this very briefly and in the context of Fusion Tables.

Google Fusion Tables

In short, if you are looking for a brief introduction to data and analysis this might be a decent quick course for you to take. Or if you want a very rough introduction to Fusion Tables it might be worth it as well.