26 weeks

Data Analyst

Analyst-grade Excel, SQL, BI tooling, Python, R and AI-assisted workflow fluency

Weekly timeline

1

Phase 1: Core Analytics Mastery

  1. Week 1

    Excel Foundations & Data Cleaning

    • Interface, cell referencing ($)
    • Conditional formatting rules
    • TRIM, CONCAT, LEFT, RIGHT, TEXTSPLIT
    • Data validation, duplicate removal, Flash Fill

  2. Week 2

    Advanced Formulas & Lookups

    • XLOOKUP, INDEX-MATCH, VLOOKUP
    • SUMIFS, COUNTIFS, AVERAGEIFS
    • IF, AND, OR, IFERROR, nested IF
    • Date/time functions

  3. Week 3

    Pivot Tables, Charts & Dashboards

    • Pivot Tables, grouping, calculated fields
    • Slicers, Timelines
    • Pivot Charts: Bar, Line, Combo, Waterfall, Gauge
    • Interactive operational Excel dashboard

  4. Week 4

    SQL Fundamentals & Filtering

    • RDBMS basics, MySQL Workbench setup
    • DDL/DML: CREATE, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE
    • SELECT, WHERE, ORDER BY, LIMIT, DISTINCT
    • LIKE, IN, BETWEEN, IS NULL

  5. Week 5

    Aggregations & Grouping

    • GROUP BY, HAVING
    • SUM, AVG, COUNT, MIN, MAX
    • Handling NULL values
    • String manipulation, date-time formatting

  6. Week 6

    Joins, Set Operators & Subqueries

    • INNER, LEFT, RIGHT, FULL OUTER, CROSS, SELF JOIN
    • UNION vs UNION ALL
    • Scalar, multi-row, correlated subqueries

  7. Week 7

    Advanced SQL & Performance

    • CTEs and recursive CTEs
    • Window functions: ROW_NUMBER, RANK, LAG, LEAD, running totals
    • Views, indexing basics, query optimization

  8. Week 8

    Power BI: Data Ingestion & Power Query

    • Power BI Desktop architecture
    • ETL with Power Query
    • Merging/appending tables, custom columns, unpivoting

  9. Week 9

    Data Modeling & Visualizations

    • Star & Snowflake schemas
    • 1-to-many relationships, active vs inactive
    • Card, Gauge, Bar, Line, Matrix, Decomposition Tree

  10. Week 10

    DAX Deep Dive

    • Calculated columns vs measures
    • SUMX, AVERAGEX, CALCULATE, FILTER, ALL, ALLEXCEPT
    • Time intelligence: TOTALYTD, SAMEPERIODLASTYEAR, DATEADD

  11. Week 11

    Reports, Security & Service

    • Drill-through pages, bookmarks, custom tooltips
    • Row-Level Security setup
    • Publishing to Power BI Service, scheduled refresh

  12. Week 12

    Tableau Fundamentals

    • Interface layout, Extract vs Live
    • Dimensions vs Measures, Discrete vs Continuous
    • Bar, Stacked Bar, Line, Area charts

  13. Week 13

    Advanced Visualizations & Maps

    • Scatter plots, treemaps, heatmaps, bullet graphs
    • Dual-axis charts
    • Symbol maps, filled maps, geospatial mapping

  14. Week 14

    Calculations & LODs

    • Calculated fields, table calculations
    • LOD expressions: FIXED, INCLUDE, EXCLUDE
    • Sets, parameters, filters

  15. Week 15

    Dashboards, Stories & Publishing

    • Interactive dashboard design
    • Actions: filter, highlight, URL
    • Storyboards, publishing to Tableau Public/Server

  16. Week 16

    Python Programming Core

    • Jupyter/VS Code setup
    • Data types, lists, dictionaries
    • Conditionals, loops, functions, lambda expressions

  17. Week 17

    Data Wrangling with Pandas & NumPy

    • NumPy arrays and operations
    • Pandas DataFrames/Series, reading CSV/Excel/SQL
    • Handling missing data, deduplication, datetime parsing

  18. Week 18

    Data Manipulation & Aggregation

    • groupby(), agg(), pivot_table()
    • merge(), joining, concatenating
    • Reshaping with melt

  19. Week 19

    Data Visualization: Matplotlib & Seaborn

    • Custom plotting, subplots, axes
    • Histograms, KDE plots, boxplots, violin plots
    • Heatmaps, pairplots, correlation matrices

  20. Week 20

    R Fundamentals & Data Structures

    • RStudio setup, R syntax
    • Vectors, factors, matrices, data frames, lists
    • Control structures, custom functions

  21. Week 21

    Data Manipulation with Tidyverse & dplyr

    • dplyr verbs: select, filter, mutate, summarize, group_by
    • Piping operator
    • Data reshaping with tidyr

  22. Week 22

    Data Visualization with ggplot2

    • Grammar of graphics
    • geom_point, geom_bar, geom_boxplot, geom_line
    • Faceting, themes, publishing-quality exports

  23. Week 23

    Capstone: End-to-End SQL to BI

    • Extract raw data via complex CTEs/joins in MySQL
    • Clean and transform in Power BI/Tableau
    • Build interactive dashboards with business KPIs

  24. Week 24

    Capstone: Statistical Data Science

    • Full EDA on messy real-world datasets
    • Python and R side by side
    • Document insights, statistical takeaways, visual charts
2

Phase 2: AI Practice & Automation for Analysts

  1. Week 25

    AI Prompting, Query Generation & Problem Solving

    • Structured prompting: Role-Task-Context-Constraint, Chain-of-Thought
    • LLMs converting business questions into optimized SQL
    • AI-assisted DAX/Pandas/regex/ggplot2 scripting
    • Auto-generating executive summaries from statistical outputs

  2. Week 26

    AI Automation & AI Agents in Analytics Workflows

    • Automated data cleaning, synthetic data generation
    • Conversational analytics: Power BI Q&A, Copilot, custom LLM agents
    • End-to-end AI-assisted pipeline: prompt to SQL to DAX/Pandas to report to slides