Your 6-month journey to becoming a confident data analyst.
Excel → SQL → Power BI → Portfolio. One phase at a time.
Welcome. You're about to spend the next six months learning one of the most valuable skills of this decade. By the end, you'll be able to pull data from a database, clean it, analyze it, and tell a story with it that helps real people make real decisions. That's what a data analyst does, and that's exactly where you're headed.
This roadmap moves through three skills in a specific order. Each one builds on the last, so please don't skip ahead.
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One rule that matters more than anything
Watching tutorials isn't learning. You learn by typing every formula, writing every query, and building every project yourself, even when it feels slow. Slow is fine. Passive isn't.
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| Phase | Timeline | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Excel | Weeks 1 to 6 | Clean messy data, build pivot tables, and create dashboards managers actually use. |
| 2. SQL | Weeks 7 to 14 | Pull and transform data from any relational database with queries, joins, and window functions. |
| 3. Power BI | Weeks 15 to 22 | Model data, write DAX, and build interactive dashboards that tell a business story. |
| 4. Portfolio | Weeks 23 to 26 | Ship a polished portfolio and capstone ready to share with recruiters. |
Plan for 10 to 15 hours per week. That's 1.5 to 2 hours on a weekday plus a bigger block on the weekend. Less than that and six months becomes nine. More than that and you risk burning out. Consistency wins.
Weeks 1 to 6 · Where every analyst starts, and honestly, most never stop using it.
You'll learn to think about data in rows and columns, transform it with formulas, and summarize it with pivot tables. Every skill here shows up again in SQL and Power BI.
| Week | Focus | What You'll Learn |
|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | Getting Comfortable | Workbook navigation, data types, absolute vs relative references, formatting, shortcuts. |
| Week 2 | Core Formulas | SUM, AVERAGE, COUNT, IF, nested IFs, AND, OR, ROUND, TEXT. |
| Week 3 | Lookup & Logic | VLOOKUP, HLOOKUP, XLOOKUP, INDEX + MATCH, IFERROR, IFS, SWITCH. |
| Week 4 | Data Cleaning | Text to Columns, TRIM, CLEAN, PROPER, Find and Replace, duplicates, dates. |
| Week 5 | Pivots & Analysis | Pivot tables, calculated fields, slicers, SUMIFS, COUNTIFS, conditional formatting. |
| Week 6 | Charts & Dashboards | Column, bar, line, combo charts, dynamic ranges, one-page dashboard. |
▸ Pick one main course and stick with it