Course logistics

This course is a required course in our graduate level Concentration in Business Analytics as well as for our undergraduate Minor in Business Analytics (the MIS 4460 section). Both graduate and undergrad students from a variety of programs find their way to this course: MBA, Master of Accounting, MS in IT Management, MS in Applied Statistics, undergraduates in School of Business, Actuarial Scence, and the School of Engineering and Computer Science. The diverse mix of students make this a very enjoyable class to teach and take.

General

See Moodle for syllabus and information about assignments, quizzes, and the final project.

Textbook and software

Please see Moodle for textbook information.

Software Overview

Microsoft Excel

We will use MS Excel 2016/2019/2021/365 extensively in this course. The SBA computer labs all have Excel 2019. If you have either Excel 365, 2021, 2019 or 2016 on your personal computer, you should be fine.

Important Note regarding Office for the Mac: Unfortunately, MS has simply not made Excel for the Mac into the product it needs to be. There are add-ins we’ll be using in this class as well as lots of VBA code that make it very difficult (and sometimes, impossible) for Mac versions of Excel to be used.

Another option for accessing a Windows version of Excel is to use OU’s Apporto Virtual Lab. See https://www.oakland.edu/uts/common-good-core-resources/virtual-labs/ for details. I also posted a screencast and additional links in Moodle regarding Apporto in the Additional Software Resources section.

Yet another option for accessing a Windows version of Excel is to use the online version of O365 available for free to OU students. This document tells the students how to download and install but it also gets you to the office 365 online account. After that, students can go to office365.com, log in with their OU login and click the Apps button for the online apps which includes the copilot AI inside Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and others.

Textbook files

Both of the textbooks we use ship with a number of student files associated with examples, problems, cases, etc. These will all be available on our Moodle site within the Textbook and Software section.

Palisade Decision Tools Suite

This is the primary Excel add-in that we will use. Palisade adds a ton of great business analytics functionality to Excel including simulation (@Risk), optimization, and data mining. Detailed instructions for obtaining and installing the Palisade Decision Tools Suite will be made available. We will NOT need this software for several weeks.

Tableau

This is a widely used data pivoting, exploration and visualization tool. You can get a free student copy through the SBA.

Get Tableau (free academic license) - see Moodle.