S4E5: How to Get Started in Data Analytics With Ben Collins

This episode was transcribed with the help of an AI transcription tool. Please forgive any typos.

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Laurence Bradford 1:01
Fullstack Academy is a leading coding boot camp that helps great people become great developers at top companies like Google and Facebook. Visit bootcampprep.io to get a $500 scholarship to Fullstack Academy's beginner coding course called Boot Camp Prep. In today's episode, I talk with Ben Collins, a spreadsheet developer and online instructor at Benl.collins.com. We talk about data tools and resources for beginners, his courses as well as plans for the future, and much more. We even discussed productivity tips for managing your day. Ben Collins, the spreadsheet developer, data consultant and data analytics instructor, he writes and creates courses at benlcollins.com. And works with using data and Google Sheets, app scripts and Data Studio. I love Ben's work and actually turn to his videos whenever I'm trying to figure something out in Google Sheets at my full time job at Teachable. That said I'm super excited that he's put together a special offer for Learn to Code With Me listeners. If you want to step up your spreadsheet game, you can get 20% off his Google Sheets training bundle by using my affiliate link at learntocodewith.me/sheets. Going through this link will automatically apply the 20% discount on this course. If you stick around to the end of the show, I'll tell you a bit more about what the bundle includes.

Laurence Bradford 2:28
Hey, Ben, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Ben Collins 2:31
Hi, Laurence, thank you so much for having me on the show. It's great to be here.

Laurence Bradford 2:34
Yeah, as I said in the beginning, I use your videos all the time when I'm trying to figure out something new in Google Sheets. So I'm really excited to have you on. But let's go back in time real quick. What were you doing before you got into tech?

Ben Collins 2:48
So if I go back, let me think six years then I was living back in the UK. And I was working as a forensic accountant and that's an accountant who does investigate into financial wrongdoings. I was working for a law firm. And then I moved to America with that job, actually. So that was five years ago, five and a half years ago came to Washington DC. And, you know, through that job, I was using Excel day in day out, you know, 10 hours a day, probably the weekends as well. And that's where I learned my craft. I also learned SQL during that time, because the data got so big it outgrew Excel. And I realized, I just loved I'd always sort of been had an interest in the tech actually. And then when I started doing SQL at work, I thought this is what I need to know, transition to doing data analysis full time, because that's I was enjoying that a lot more than the accounting. Yeah, so I so probably three years ago, I jumped I jumped ship and try to or turn off years ago to make to make this work.

Laurence Bradford 3:53
So you mentioned data analysts. Could you explain for listeners who may not be super familiar with that what a data analysts does?

Ben Collins 4:02
It's actually it really just boils down to one. One key job, which is to gain insights from all this data we have. And when you think about it like that, it's nice simple concept, really, we just have all this data, it's a bit like the oil, we take out the ground, and it needs to be refined. so that it can be useful, it can help us make decisions to improve the business to move the business forward and to, you know, make make people's lives better. But that's sort of the scope then to to refine that data is huge, because you have to first of all, gather that data, and then clean that data up. Understand it work out how, what answers you're trying to get from it, and then aggregate it and visualize it and ultimately, sort of distill it down into these key points that you can then make decisions with.

Laurence Bradford 4:51
Yeah, I love that. And I'm really excited to have you on the show. Also, because you are in a different career field than people usually have on the learn to code a podcast. That's something I wanted to do this season was not only feature web developers and software engineers, but also to look into other roles and tech that relate to data, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and hopefully a whole lot more. So I love what you said data is a new oil. And I interviewed someone recently on Forbes, who said the same exact thing. He's that he was a CEO of springboard. And he was just talking about in today's world, exactly, as you said, how data is the new oil. So after you were working as the forensic accountant, it sounds like your job responsibilities kind of evolved more into a data analyst position. Did you end up working on another company outside the accounting firm after this sort of switch?

Ben Collins 5:44
No, I didn't actually I so I took the switch at the end of 2014. And I actually wanted to be a web developer because I was really into the tech and I've been teaching myself some HTML, CSS and JavaScript on the side. What I found frustrating was that my job was really demanding. And I would have to drop all of that sort of side hobbies and projects for a few months while we had a big case going. And then we'd finish the case. And then I'd be able to pick up these projects again. But I'd be sort of three months behind. And I found that really frustrating. So I said, right, if I want to be a web developer, I need to, you know, I need to make a big wholesale change here. So I actually left that job, and did a part time web development course. And there and spend my days sort of teaching myself as much as I could as well. And, and as I was doing that, as I was going through that route, I was blogging about all this Google Sheet stuff I was doing as well, because I was helping some, some friends and family with building some dashboards and various other things. And that's what took off that that blog took off. And that led to some client requests. And I sort of went just ended up running with that because I realized that was my my passion working with the data rather than Trying to be a web developer.

Laurence Bradford 7:01
I was I did not know that. So you were taking a part time course like a developer or like a coding boot camp or something?

Ben Collins 7:06
It was a it was with General Assembly, and it was there part time back end web development courses. It was 10 weeks old for two nights a week. And it really helped me just to it opened my eyes to a lot more what was out there with coding actually. And like I said, ultimately, I realized that my passion was data analysis, but it just gave me a bunch of extra skills. And it made me a lot more comfortable with programming. And even though I haven't touched Ruby on Rails, really since then, you know, I use JavaScript a lot now. And that definitely helped me transition into doing more coding heavy projects, and that sort of stuff.

Laurence Bradford 7:44
Yeah, it definitely makes sense. They're definitely related. And I don't know maybe correct me if you think I'm wrong, but just in my experience working and especially like the last year, so I feel like data and just like data science data analytics webinar. analytics, whatever you want to call, it is so much more lucrative as far as, like what companies are looking for. And again, I'm just speaking from my own experience and my own perspective and things i've you know, encountered, but I know at teachable, some of our data roles are like the hardest to fill, and meaning that there's, you know, a lot of demand not enough supply. Do you like kind of find that to be similar? Or?

Ben Collins 8:25
Yeah. Is it because I've now been working for myself? I have not, you know, I haven't been hiring people myself, but I've been talking to my wife who hires quite a few people for her, her company, and yeah, definitely, there's a couple of days roles they had that were some of the hardest to find qualified candidates for. And, you know, I think that the the demand has just exploded because of the amount of data we now have and the the realization that you can have a competitive advantage by having a good handle on all your data. But like you say, the supply just hasn't caught up yet. And so Do you think it's a great, it's a really huge growth opportunity over the next five, five to 10 years, it's hard to look too far beyond because, you know, the tech world changes so quickly. And I think we're just about to go through another seismic shift, when AI sort of realizes its full potential, so it's hard to know where we'll be in 10 years time, but I think for now, I mean, certainly data will always be there, and people who can understand it and work with it will always be it will always be in in huge demand.

Laurence Bradford 9:28
Yeah. 100%. And I always tell people, when I get emails, and if they're, if maybe they're asking question like, Oh, you know, I want to learn programming, but I'm also really interested in data science, or even maybe they say, artificial intelligence or something like that. And I always say, Well, if you have the interest, you should, in my experience, data roles are really, they get very lucrative and, you know, a lot of demand. So in my perspective, it's like a better path to go down if you have that interest. But in any case, so if someone is listening right now, and they want to get started Started in data analytics, what is a good way for them to go about it?

Ben Collins 10:06
So the first thing I'd say with any endeavor like this is it's it's a long term sort of process. You know, you don't decide on a Friday that you want to be a data analyst and wake up on Monday morning and you're qualified data analyst. So, you know, you have to have a long term mindset. And I think you have to just be prepared to persevere when you're learning these sorts of, you know, technical skills and is applying to web development as well, is to really just persevere and just keep going and going and going, even when it feels like you're just hitting your head against a wall.

Ben Collins 10:36
Because that's, I think the biggest takeaway I've learned in the last few years, working myself and teach myself a lot of different tech skills is it sort of won't make sense maybe for a month and then suddenly you get a little breakthrough. And it's like that game Minesweeper where the whole board opens up and you can keep going. It's a little bit like that. In terms of specifics to date analysis, I'd say, you know, just focus Focus on the fundamentals really, and whether that's, you know, starting with Excel, or sheets, and then and then picking up some SQL as well. And then and then just find out which areas interest you, I think, you know, trying to dive into the latest and greatest VR or AI, technology, whatever, whatever it is probably not the best until you've got those, those fundamentals sort of really solid, and then you know, and then you can see what what direction you want to go in and really then tailor your, your path to fit that.

Laurence Bradford 11:33
Awesome. So what are some of the directions that people can go in with these kind of data analysis tools,

Ben Collins 11:39
you know, it's, uh, you know, it's a huge field. So I, my role and all my work focuses a lot on the Google Sheets stuff, like I said, and I've sort of found a little niche there where I can build spreadsheets and then and then build programs that sit on top of the spreadsheets to do extra sort of custom data analysis. I do a lot of visualization as well. So that's another big area. And, you know, that's sort of crosses over into the creativity, the creative side and the design side. So that's tools like Data Studio and Tableau and click, we can build these reallyfunctional, but also, you know, beautiful dashboards if you like.

Ben Collins 12:19
And then sort of the flip the other side of that, if you like, is working more, getting your hands dirty with the sort of data engineering side. So that's building the pipelines that connect different web services or, you know, extract the data from these huge databases and then massage it ready to go into into production into your web apps or whatever. So there's a huge, huge Wide Field actually. So you know, can range from you know, if you're creative and you're visually visual person, you might sort of look at the visualization side of things. If you're really into your coding and engineering. Maybe you get down there data engineering, database administration type stuff, or maybe you know, you sit in the middle, and you're really into the actual analysis and statistics part of it, and you sort of focusing on the learning algorithms and you know, you might want to learn are the pregnant language are? So yeah, so a myriad of options, actually, it's a big field. It's exciting.

Laurence Bradford 13:18
Yeah, yeah, there's a ton you could do with it. I never realized, of course, I knew about data science and data, and now analysts. And then you mentioned data engineering. That was a role I didn't I didn't even realize that was a role until maybe a few months ago when we were started hiring for one at teachable where I work full time. And it's actually been taking us months to fill that position. So if you're listening and you have any curiosity about what data engineering is, look into it, because I could tell you that it's it's definitely lucrative. It's definitely a role that a lot of companies are looking for. And yeah, it's in high demand. But before that, you also mentioned a few tools like Data Studio, tableau. Could you talk about those a bit more maybe some other like popular data tools or even like free tools that people could kind of get started with to see maybe if this is a path for them?

Ben Collins 14:11
Yeah, well, so it obviously you have Google Sheets, which is a great place to start. And you can do an awful lot there. And you've got Excel, which is the Microsoft equivalent. And then Data Studio is actually a free tool from Google. It's a new tool they came out with last year. And it's a specially a visualization tool. So you connect your different data sources. And it plays really well with any of the Google data sources. So your analytics data, your AdWords, data, your sheets, that sort of thing. But you can also build connections to other data sources, which, depending on which what they are, is either easy or quite hard. And then it's really super simple to just create reports, then, you know, these visual reports that can be updated, they can be in in real time, that kind of thing. And Tableau is Like that, but on steroids, you can do a lot more agile data analysis and a lot more sort of deeper dive as data because it's much more customizable tool. It's actually based on, it was originally called visual cue as a visual query language. So it's a bit like sequel. So it's got a very heavy database component to teller.

Laurence Bradford 15:20
Nice. Yeah, as in please correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't there a free version of Tableau people can download?

Ben Collins 15:26
There is. And so that's absolutely, definitely the place to start. Now, the caveat with the free version is that you can only save workbooks, then to the tableau service on their Tableau public workspace. So, if you need private if you want private workbooks, because your data is proprietary, then you'll need to pay for a license for tableau, which is expensive, but it's if it's an investment that a firm can pay, then you know, it can be it can be a business cost, but it's expensive if you're an individual, in which case absolutely, I'd say start with the free one. There's a great group of tabs enthusiasts and some real Tableau wizards that run this thing called makeover Monday. And every Monday, they put out a new data set. And they will challenge each other to make a visualization of that data set. And it was it really blew up last year, I think they had sort of hundreds and hundreds of people joining in this this make every Monday and I think it's still going I did a few last year. And it's really, really vibrant community actually. And I think it's still going this year. So, and all of those old data is still there that you can go ahead and download. And they're great. It's a great way to learn tableau, actually, you can start there and see what other people have done and try and replicate it.

Laurence Bradford 16:38
Nice. Nice. So you are, I think one of the first people I've had on the show that specializes in data in one way or another. And it's really, really exciting. I'm so happy that I'm starting to talk about these different careers in tech. I think it's already mentioned the beginning. But could you recommend any other data blogs or resources to the listeners who maybe are hearing About this for the first time and want to just give the industry and just give the field a greater look.

Ben Collins 17:05
Yeah, absolutely. This is one that jumps out to me straightaway. And that's a guy called and his name is hospitals, actually. But he worked. He's a Google evangelist evangelist for data. And his name is Avinash Kaushik. So, and his website is KUSHik.net. And he's a Google Analytics advocate, or a digital marketing advocate, but he's very heavy in the data in AI, and he just writes really, he sort of writes, I'm sure he's a year ahead of us all. He writes sort of, instead of being in the weeds about this tool, when you press this button to make it do this or that, he's sort of, he's zoomed right out to the 40,000 foot view and talking about the sort of industry as a whole and marketing and data and it's really fascinating stuff actually. So I'd recommend his his newsletter. And then who else? You know, are you sort of? I don't really have any I have some the Google forums, obviously I go to a lot. I use Stack Overflow a lot. So a lot of my job I do actually is we'll say about a quarter. My job is App Script programming, which is JavaScript, but used to extend Google Docs. And so when I'm working that stuff, I'm in Stack Overflow for the lock.

Laurence Bradford 18:24
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Laurence Bradford 20:22
Yes, yes, of course the one that I can think of, and I haven't given the podcast, listen, to be totally honest. But I've data science Rene is becoming a data scientist calm. So that's more obviously about data science not did analytics so much. But that's like one resource that I can think of. And I am having other guests on the show this season that work in data related careers. So for the listeners, yeah, I'm excited about that.

Ben Collins 20:51
Hopefully, you'll see this as well with a subscribe to the newsletter. And it's called Data Elixir here. So, data and then Elixir. And it's sort of just Data Science News. And they this guy pulls out all of the sort of five to 10 links from today's science world for that week. So some stories and tutorials. It's really, really good stuff actually.

Laurence Bradford 21:14
Awesome. We'll make sure to put that in the show notes as well. dado elixir, and it's a newsletter. Great. So what does your average day look like Ben, because you have the blog, you have the courses, you have a newsletter. And then do you do consulting work outside of that?

Ben Collins 21:29
I do. So I did a lot of consulting work last year. I've done less this year, because I've been focused on the courses. But I've just, you know, at any time, I have a handful of clients that I'm working with. And so a typical day actually. There's not really typically but I try and sort of, or I'm trying to employ a strategy this year of being much more focused on chunks of time to do crazy work, then a chunk of time to do my emails and my comments on the blog and all that kind of stuff. Send out invoices and, and then another chunk of crazy time in the afternoon. So my day would look typically like, you know, drop the kids at daycare, sit down at my desk by 830 and don't even open my email or Twitter or Facebook or anything.

Ben Collins 22:14
So just just open the my editing software to do either recording videos or writing blog posts or coding whatever it is until about 12 o'clock then I then I flick up and all my emails and my any social and stuff of that and I spend about an hour, hour and a half going through all of that that stuff just answer you know, reply to one reason I really enjoy that stuff. Actually, I love sort of trying to help people into these questions, and I do as much as I can. And then after lunch and about 130 or two, I close all that down again for the day and just focus on creative stuff until I get pick up the kids at five. And then if I have the energy I try and jump back online about a Thursday when everyone's Abed in bed to just read I thought what I can there or do do a bit more creative work if I can. And I'm trying to do that, because it's time is really limited, not limited time is just sort of, I guess, limited. I don't have the option really to work much at the weekend at the moment or, you know, past five o'clock. And that's the way it should be because I want to spend my time with my kids. That's number one. Done, which is making me be really efficient with the time I do have. So So yeah, so typical day is sort of crazy work. And then a chunk of business work and then a chunk of crazy working afternoon.

Laurence Bradford 23:32
Yeah, what you're saying with the whole idea that time is limited. And, you know, you only have certain hours a day reminds me of this book I'm reading Well, I just began reading it. So I haven't finished it yet. But I already know it's going to be like game changing. For me. It's called the 12 week year. And it's all about productivity and kind of setting up your schedule based on like a 12 week plan and that kind of breaks down into a one week plan. And then actually day plans because it's all about the actions you take Every day lead up to these like, kind of greater goals like these, like 12 week goals. Anyway, so for anyone listening who wants to learn more about productivity is something I just been reading lately. And I think it was it's really insightful. It's definitely been helping me. And yeah, because you don't realize sometimes how much time you spend in these communication apps. Another thing I've been using, I've been using this for a bit, but rescue time. Are you familiar with that?

Ben Collins 24:24
I've not used it, but I have heard of it, actually.

Laurence Bradford 24:26
Yeah. So it just breaks down like how you spend your time on the computer. And for me, the biggest thing Well again, so I have you know, my, my full time job, and then everything else I do outside of that, but at my full time job, so so it's taking into account this too, but we use slack for communication. And my time per week on slack is like kind of horrifying. Like, I look. It's like nine hours, 10 hours. I'm like, Oh my god, how am I spinning up. Again, I could have just left the window open and stepped away from my computer and then it's just kind of logging in as slack But still, it's just it's just my Blowing So anyways, another little tip for people if they want to see like, where they're spending their time online every day. But yeah, that's that's really smart to break up your days like that and -

Ben Collins 25:10
I find it really a huge boost actually to to turn all of those distractions off. And then, you know, it's hard to do you have to be really disciplined that you're not perfect often, you know, I might jump in if I felt like I had to do something, but I try my best to not have those distractions open so I can really focus and then you really can get a huge amount done. One of the quotes I like Actually, I'm not sure who it's attributed to, but that we we tend to overestimate what we can do in a single day, but underestimate what we can do in a year. And you know, sometimes I just remind myself that if I don't get if I get frustrated that I haven't got as much done as I wanted that day and I tell myself, Well, if I just do what I absolutely everything I can do, and I'm focused, and I do that every single day and just keep repeating that, then it's amazing what when you look back at the end of the week or the end of the month or the end of the year. It's amazing what you can get done. If you just keep going And focus even just one hour a day, you know, that's that's the way I would say if you let the ladies go outside of work if you could put in one hour a day, and even even that's a logic but, you know, that sort of little bit of time just builds cumulatively, and it's really amazing what you can do.

Laurence Bradford 26:16
Yeah, and it's amazing I think how much you can get done when you have like a deadline and I'm trying to explain this like the right way but this has actually been happening to me the past several days, I've as I've begun doing a lot more podcast recordings for the season. But I've still been able to get a lot done even though I get I have these like different interviews to do but what's it says saying like how like it feels the time you allot it so like if I want to finish an email or an article or something, and I only have like 30 minutes left, even though usually take me an hour back because I have something else to do. It still only takes me 30 minutes cuz that's the time I have.

Ben Collins 26:51
Yeah, that's it. That's absolutely a great point, which is, again, while I tried to limit myself to sort of an hour, an hour and a half to do all these things, because then I don't hang around and progressive Just open an email, answer it, move on next email, you know, rather than open it and then close it till answer that data, then open it again. And then I half draft an email and then close it and then open it again. And it's such a time waster Really? So yeah, absolutely.

Laurence Bradford 27:15
Yeah. Awesome. So I've had various freelancers and consultants on the show who mostly work in programming and web development. But I've never had one on on the show that works as a data analyst. So I don't know how much you can dive into it. Like if so your clients are, again, you're working with proprietary information. But how do you get clients as a data analyst? And how long are the projects for what does that usually look like? I honestly have like no idea what that's like. So I'm just super curious.

Ben Collins 27:47
That's a great question actually. And so all of my clients that's interested so most of my clients are either actually come through my website, and so I've been blogging there for two and a half years. It's gets about 60,000 hits of views a month. And you know that I think it's sort of people who are coming to solve very specific problems. And then they see, hey, here's a guy who might be able to help us. And then, you know, maybe we can ask him to help us out. So I get, I get a lot of leads through my website. I also did some teaching for General Assembly for a year and a half, I taught data analytics for them. So they have a 10 week, part time data analytics course XML sequence, tableau, and two nights a week sort of thing. And I taught that three times, and a few a few of the people I met, like a few of the students I taught actually turned into into clients, helping them with some, some ongoing dashboard and data analysis work.

Ben Collins 28:47
And really, so in terms of the actual projects, they can, they can some of them can be pretty small, actually, last year was doing even just really small sort of two three hour consulting calls to help people solve certain things. Not really doing that. Now. I'm planning to just go for bigger projects and also focus on building my courses this year. But then a typical project, you know, might be anything from actually doing data analysis, which, you know, with, here's some data, the client has helped me make heads or tails of it. Or, you know, some of the projects have done it more like data engineering, where a client wants me to build an App Script connected to a certain API to then pull the data automatically, and then display some, some dynamic charts and that sort of stuff. So there's quite a gamut of projects already. But they're all sort of use Google sheets or Google Apps Script or these students somewhere other. That's sort of my niche. And that's how they all get tied together.

Laurence Bradford 29:44
Yep. And of course, your courses. And I think most of your blog posts are all about those areas as well.

Ben Collins 29:50
Yeah, that's right. So as I said, I started a blog can five years ago and the first few personally the first post in the first couple posts, I think were about Google Sheets and then the one they were about building dashboards and they're the ones that really sort of took off and eventually led to me getting some clients. But I wrote about SQL I wrote about Ruby on Rails I wrote about tableau. And it's really, I guess, for the last, maybe last 18 months or so I've been really focused just on the Google ecosystem. And that's what's really helped me move forward, move to the next level.

Laurence Bradford 30:22
Yeah, I think, especially for you like specializing in that one area could also probably help attract clients better, because they may be googling something really specific, like App Script. Yeah, like API did a Google Sheet and then you have maybe one of the only blog posts on it, you show up right away on Google. They click over and they go, Hey, I should hire this guy to help me do this. And then they reach out to you.

Ben Collins 30:46
Yeah, so there's, you're right, there's actually not nowhere near as much or many resources out there, as there are for Excel. So I always compare myself or rather, I compare sort of the The direction I'm going to feel like with the Excel world, because they've been doing this for sort of five or 10 years launching courses and building out these agencies and all this sort of stuff, and really I feel like the Google Sheets world is is just coming into its prime in that regard. And so, yeah, my goal, actually, really, the mission statement for myself I have is that I'm trying to create the best online resource for learning Google Sheets, Data Studio and App Script, and specifically for data analysis with those tools. And as you said, I do the client work we talked about. And then the other big push lending that I started earlier this year, is to create these courses. So it's doing data analysis with these specific tools. And that's been something I've wanted to do for about two and a half years to three years. And finally, this year, just got my act together and published my first course in February.

Laurence Bradford 31:52
Yeah, congratulations on that. And of course, you're using Teachable, but it's funny because I think I found your videos I think before I realized you were actually a teachable instructor. And then once I realized that I was watching more of your videos so I would I go to YouTube actually or just google your name or something and I'm like Ben Collins pivot table so I'm so I'm a newbie, I'm still I'm kind of newbie and Google Sheets, but I'm trying to get better. I could do pivot tables now and things with charts, but I'm not building like full fledged dashboards yet, hopefully, someday. But yeah, I'll actually specifically look up your name and videos, because that's how good your videos are. And I'm like, you I mean, honestly, you have an amazing talent, like, the way you explain things. Also, are you video video editing the videos yourself? Because they're so clear, like, especially in some of the courses, I was watching a few videos there, and the whole like the graphics and everything, it just goes so well together.

Ben Collins 32:51
Yeah, I do see myself actually. It does take a lot of time. And so you know, I would like to push up A little bit more frequently than I do, because I have so many so many ideas. But I'm, you know, I, the editing is really time consuming, but I do enjoy it sort of transforming into the final product. But it meant learning another skill, and I would by no means am an expert, but I just know how to make it work for my videos.

Laurence Bradford 33:19
Yeah, well, I think it's I mean, it's gigs for what you're doing. It's great. I mean, the screencasts. And me, you know, the annotations. And so I'm getting like really nitty gritty now. But it's really I you know, I watch a lot of courses, a lot of videos, and it's really impressive what you're doing like on your own.

Ben Collins 33:34
Well, thank you.

Laurence Bradford 33:36
Yeah, of course. So what's coming ahead. You said you had a lot of great ideas for future courses. What can we expect from you in the future?

Ben Collins 33:44
Yeah, great question, actually. And I love looking forwards and brainstorming new ideas. So I'm actually I'm working on a course at the moment that's going to be a free course. And it's it's all about some more advanced topics in Google Sheets, more advanced formulas specifically. So sort of If you're a spreadsheet, if you're familiar with spreadsheets, you'll probably know about the formula called the V lookup seems to be sort of the famous, slightly difficult formula. And it's really, it's really sort of, Okay, if you know, you're at that level of doing the V lookup, then this is like a springboard to the next realm of formulas from that. And they can really then transform your, your data skills inside of Google Sheets, because you can sort of mix and match all that data exactly how you want. So there's going to be a, a, actually, there's a, there's a JavaScript instructor called Where's boss, who does these fantastic JavaScript courses, and he has one called 30 day JavaScript. And it's a free course about 30 day challenges to build JavaScript stuff. And so I wanted to sort of do a 30 day formula challenge, of course, I thought was a great idea.

Ben Collins 34:51
You know, it'd be one topic you'd learn each day. And so that's the premise of this one, and actually, I'm hopefully gonna launch that in the Certainly this year, hopefully sometime in sort of November. So I just sort of in the recording phase for that. And then beyond that, I've got some really interesting client projects on at the moment. So that's good as well. That's always fun. And the next course next big course I'd like to do is all about Data Studio, the Google visualization tool. And that will involve, you know, some some research for a while. And then some of the client work I'm doing right now, actually, as Data Studio work. So that's going to help me really get some good content together, we'll sort of see what the real world problems people face with that tool. And that I'd like to release in 2018, sometime in q1. And then beyond that, also, the other course I'd like to do some some App Script related course. So App Script for analysts is what I've tentatively call it and it's going to be all about how you can use Apps Script to take your spreadsheet skills and your data skills to sort of new places by exploring how you can do things like one of the tools I built actually, for General Assembly work for my self assembly was a tool that sent my all my student marks from a Google Sheet directly into their slack channels. And all I had to do is just press a button in my Google Sheet and it sent all that sort of, here's your score for your for your final project. And here's your feedback. And they just went to everybody's direct to people Slack channel. So you didn't really fun stuff like that. And I'd like to do, of course around building little applications like that, actually, next year.

Laurence Bradford 36:29
That's awesome. I definitely want to see that one. There's a I could go on for ages. But again, with my work now, I'm using Google Sheets more and more. And I just love all Google Drive. And I love how easy it is to integrate, like charts into presentations, and because it's all sort of connected things together. So I am a huge Google fan, huge Google Sheets fan and love your content. So keep doing what you're doing. And thank you, Ben, for again for coming on. I love chatting with you. Where can people find you online?

Ben Collins 36:59
So my home online is benlcollins.com. And so that's the best place to start. And you can find links to all of my other channels there. And pretty much Ben L. Collins is my online names if you find that on Twitter, and if you find on YouTube, it's that. And then I have a Facebook page, which is Ben Collins data because I couldn't get the gist of the read the website. If you start there, you'll find all the links to everything.

Laurence Bradford 37:30
Awesome. Thanks again for coming on.

Ben Collins 37:32
Thank you so much for having me on. It's been great to chat.

Laurence Bradford 37:39
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Ben. If you want to improve your spreadsheet skills, you might want to take advantage of Ben's special offer for Learn to Code With Me listeners, which includes two of his courses. The first is Data Cleaning and Pivot Tables and Google sheets which is designed for beginners to intermediate level Google Sheets users this course teaches you techniques and best practices for cleaning data and preparing it for analysis and reporting, which will save you hours of tedious and repetitive work. His second course build dashboards with Google Sheets and Data Studio will teach you how to create dashboards that are automated, interactive, and attractive. Whether you want to get into data analysis, learn a new skill, or just improve your spreadsheets, I highly recommend Ben's courses. You can get both of these courses with a special 20% discount off at learntocodewith.me/sheets. Again, that URL is learntocodewith.me/sheets that is an affiliate link. So if you decide to buy I will get a small commission for referring you. As always, I really appreciate you supporting learn to code with me. Again the Show Notes for this episode can be found at learntocode with.me/podcast. If you're listening to this episode in the future, simply click that Search icon in the upper navigation and type in Ben's name. His first name is B-E-N and the last name is C-O-L-L-I-N-S. Thank you so much for tuning in and I'll see you next time.