DSO 547 - Spreadsheet Modeling for Business Insights

The value of this course will depend on how the professor structures the course, but will be helpful to people who have little knowledge of how to use excel

Excel is one of the most in-demand skills professionally. This course will help make you comfortable with Excel and some of the optimization tools in it. This course will not teach you about Pivot tables though. Hiroshi isn't the best professor to teach this though.

feels like an extension of Phil Rogers' class. solver-based, very focused on optimization problems. feel like only a small handful of jobs would this actually be useful and applicable

Hiroshi is not the greatest at Excel. He does a lot of things inefficiently, but his class is very entertaining, and the course material is very relevant for a Finance career.

If you do not like Hiroshi as a professor do not take this class. However, if you enjoy Hiroshi and his teaching style this class is very useful. It is a big step up from the data modeling course you take during core.

This class provides practical skills regardless of career function/industry. Content covers different types of modeling and critical thinking involved. Although some of this was repeated from Phil Rogers' core class, it goes into more in depth practical applications and examples - good practice!

Great course- helped me understand methods to build business models. Very useful indeed.

This was a step down from the core predecessor of this class. Wish I had chosen something different. Hiroshi isn't effective at this subject.

I thought this would be a hardcore excel class but it really is not. There is a lot of "theory" that Omeed talks about during class and you spend less than half the class doing stuff in Excel. HE also don't teach the excel portion very well and leaves you to figure things out on your own. There are no amazing excel tutorials or advanced excel functions. You learn how to create very basic excel financial models and extremely basic regression and optimization models. Omeed is also a terrible professor and literally told the entire class that we were "pathetic" and that he doesn't bring in speakers because we're not a worth audience. He thinks he's above everyone because he simply went to Harvard Business School but he doesn't realize that going to Harvard doesn't buy class. If you have a different teacher who is not insane the class might be more enjoyable

Useful class but the professor is having a really bad semester.

I like Hiroshi a lot. He's a goofball, but he knows his stuff. You will learn the hell out of excel modeling. It is definitely hard content, and many students get frustrated by it.

In many ways, this is what the core excel class should be. (Data-based decisionmaking) It is more basic than core in some ways (less statistics) and more advanced in others (macros), but the pace is much slower, allowing more retention. That said, I thoroughly enjoyed Phil Rogers' core excel class, so if you hated it you may want to take my recommendation lightly.

This is a very helpful class if you're looking to add to your excel model-building prowess. I was already pretty proficient after years of management consulting, but this class really helps in building more intricate models and leveraging logic and add-ins to inform a more structured decision-making process. Hiroshi has a unique style, which I happen to enjoy, but take this class from him if you enjoyed his style in teaching Operations. There is definite value in this course, whether its thinking about how you structure models or leverage excel.

The skills I have learned in this class have been very important for recruiting, and they ask a lot about the skills that I have been able to develop in this course. MBA's are expected to be strong in Excel, and this course is a fantastic way to develop those skills. This class should be part of core.

Useful if you don't have an advanced Excel background, or experience building models. Better than core Excel class. Still hard to learn Excel in a classroom setting, not sure how well I could replicate what we learn on the job.

I've found this course extremely helpful in building my Excel skills. That being said, I took it with Selbe who I don't think is returning next fall, so I can't speak to how Hiroshi or other professors might teach it. The course is very practical in nature--its basically everything that Phil Rogers' core course SHOULD have been. Course material covers optimizations problems, financial modeling, risk, regression, and a bunch of other stuff. Strongly recommend on subject matter alone, can't speak to how other professors will handle the course though.

This semester has been really weird with Omeed. He has historically gotten fantastic reviews, but has had some strange outbursts about student discipline which have taken away significant chunks of class time. This professor is apparently leaving USC after this semester.