Three key efforts are essential to effectively transform data into actionable information: retrieving data with SQL, presenting data with Excel, and understanding statistics as the foundation of data analysis. Data mining expert Gordon Linoff focuses on these topics and shows you how SQL and Excel can be used to extract business information from relational databases. He begins by taking a look at how data is central to the task of understanding customers, products, and markets, and he then goes on to show you how to use that data to define business dimensions, store transactions about customers, and summarize important data to produce results. Along the way, he shares stories based on his personal experience in the field, intended to enrich your understanding of why some things work—and others don't.