This problem-solving-oriented course will help students grasp the skills needed for analyzing concrete business information and working out valuable results using practical business software Microsoft Access, Excel, SAS Enterprise Miner (EM), etc. With cases in different business applications including investment analysis, scheduling, loan interest analysis, knowledge discovery for business decision support, etc, students can build a practical knowledge of the capabilities of Excel, Access, and EM. More importantly, students will learn how to map real business problems into data process/analysis tasks. The case studies introduce problems that are likely to face today's business professionals and allow readers to apply the skills gained from the tutorials to solve them.

Upon successful completion of this course, students should be able to: 1. Gain familiar with advanced spreadsheet functions 2. Use spreadsheet software to aid business decision making 3. Gain familiarity with general data processing procedures 4. Understand the basic usage of data processing programming 5. Carry out analytical tasks upon real business dataset programmatically 6. Gain hands-on experiences through assignments and a real world project