Center for Innovative Leadership at Furman University

This certificate program unlocks the power of automation by showing how to convert work done in spreadsheets to using scripts that can be easily read, executed, and shared. This change unlocks a “do it once” workflow that frees analysts to focus on improvements, automation, and more in-depth analysis instead of rote tasks. The written instructions of the script are created in an intuitive language to precisely describe operations like selecting, filtering, renaming, grouping, and summarizing rows and columns of data—all using free statistical software.

We will be using the R software package because, compared to using Excel, you will be more efficient, you will be better equipped to work with large data sets, you will be able to create better & more complete reports, your graphics will be more explanatory, and your reports will be better structured, more repeatable, and more informative.

This course is the beginning of your path to get from spreadsheets to scripting—we will use the language of spreadsheets (rows, columns, filtering, data lookup, etc.) to introduce and explain. The workshop is interactive and applied, focusing on IR problems common to universities, such as admissions, retention, learning effectiveness, and diversity. Each week unlocks new abilities and ideas you can use right away.