From the course: Data Curation Foundations

What you should know

From the course: Data Curation Foundations

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What you should know

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- [Instructor] Here's what you should know before you take this course. You should have a working knowledge of how to use Microsoft Office products, namely Excel, PowerPoint, and Word because we generally make curation files using these products. You don't need to be a superuser or anything. Just having basic knowledge about how to use these applications is fine for this course. By the way, if, for whatever reason, you want to enhance your knowledge of these Microsoft Office products, I've listed some LinkedIn learning courses you could take. If you want to get a better handle on Excel, you could try Dennis Taylor's Excel 2016 training. And if you want to bone up on PowerPoint, you could try Jeff Stratton's PowerPoint 2016 Essential Training. And if enhancing your knowledge of Microsoft Word is your thing, you could take Word 2016 Essential Training by David Rivers. Then you'd have all your essentials out of the way. The second thing you should know before you take this course, is what it is like to work on a data project. Now, I know that is kind of a watery term, and I mean it in a very loosey, goosey way. You don't actually have to be a data analyst or even touch data in your job. You could be someone who writes reports based on data someone else analyzed, or a person who manages programmers who are managing data. Or maybe your job is to write data entry manuals. As long as you've got experience in situations where you have a big database, or a bunch of data to deal with, even if you don't deal them directly yourself, then this course is for you. Some of you out there contact me on LinkedIn, so I know a lot of you are A students who try to go above and beyond. Therefore, for those of you who really want to throw yourself into data curation, I'm going to suggest these two courses as optional prerequisites. They are called "Designing Big Data Healthcare Studies," and there's a part one and part two. I emphasize that these are optional because you don't really need to know anything in these two courses to get the most out of this course. It's just that when I was designing this current course, upon reflection, I realized that usually the reason I start a bunch of curation is not because we are building a database, but because we have chosen to take data out of an existing database to do a study. In other words, you can get by managing databases without a whole lot of curation, but if you actually want to do a research study, oh boy. You have to sit down and do a lot of curation. That's why I mentioned these two other courses, but remember, they are optional. All righty, that's all you need to know to take this course. In the next video, I'm going to talk to you a little about the structure of this course.

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