Practical AI Bootcamp
Empower your team with hands-on skills to unleash the power of Copilot in Excel
Real-World AI in 2025.
Is Your Team Ready?
“Python in Excel is intended to empower everyone (and we mean everyone now that we also have Copilot in Excel with Python) to do data analysis in an easy, secure, and compliant way.”
-Keyur Patel, Microsoft Principal Program Manager
AI is Being Sold Like It’s Magic
Microsoft is promising that Copilot will magically transform your organization:
Everyone in the organization with Copilot in Excel can perform amazing data analyses.
Better yet, with Copilot in Excel, everyone can harness the power of Python to perform advanced analytics.
Best of all, with Copilot in Excel, nobody needs to understand analytics, and they don’t need to know Python!
What Microsoft Won’t Tell You
Copilot will make mistakes.
Sometimes, Copilot will even make up stuff out of thin air!
The technical term for this is "hallucinations."
Sam Altman, the CEO of the most famous AI company (OpenAI), stated that hallucinations are more of a feature of AI than a bug.
Think about this for a second. What Sam Altman is saying is that hallucinations are inherent in every AI. There’s nothing you can do about it.
Every AI will sometimes make stuff up at random.
How Your Team Owns AI
Because AI hallucinates, you still need a human in the loop to validate what Copilot produces.
If you don’t do this, you’re playing with 🔥.
That’s the bad news.
Here’s the good news.
With the right skills, your team can unleash the power of Copilot in Excel.
Practical AI Bootcamp
The Practical AI Bootcamp empowers your team with the skills they need to partner with Copilot in Excel.
The true power of Copilot in Excel comes from its “advanced analysis” mode. In this mode, Copilot can gain a deep understanding of your data and even automatically analyze it.
However, there’s a catch.
Copilot generates Python code to work its magic. This Python code typically uses battle-tested analytics techniques like:
Distributions
Correlations
K-means clustering
Random forest machine learning
As demonstrated in the video above, Copilot is always confident in the code it generates, even if it’s wrong.
The outcome?
Your team will have the knowledge and hands-on skills to truly partner with Copilot:
Guiding Copilot with well-crafted prompts.
Evaluating the quality of Copilot’s output.
Re-prompting Copilot when needed.
A library of Copilot in Excel prompts is included for your team to use and extend.
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Preparation courses on Python and data analysis are included at no additional charge.
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Targeted curriculum to unleash the power of Copilot in Excel fast.
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Your team will build real-world skills via 12 hands-on labs.
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Courses can be taught in-person or virtually. Choose what works best.
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PDFs of all slides, including notes, are provided to your team.
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Bundle additional courses to expand your team’s capabilities.
What professionals have to say
Bring the same high-quality training experiences of national conferences to your team.
Training delivered in person or live virtual - whichever works best.
“Very good course as an intro to machine learning. I feel that with what I learned today I can put these skills into practice at work.”
— David Green, EMWD
“Fantastic intro ML course that’s presented in an engaging way. The content was easy to understand and the labs were easy to follow along. I’ve left the course wanting to dive deeper into the topic.”
— Jessica Liu, O-I Glass
“MIND BLOWN…not by the difficulty of the class, but by how EASY Dave makes machine learning within the reach of aspiring Data Scientists.
Easily the highlight of this year’s conference for me. I feel empowered to bring this material back to the job, put it to use, and teach it to others.”
— Chet Phelps, Health Solutions
“Best training and instructor I’ve had. Organized, clear, good pace, helpful examples, and an engaging and fun instructor.”
— Alex Kurtz, Sourceability
“I am so glad to have started the conference in Dave’s class. He set a wonderful tone for what is yet to come. I hope my other courses measure up!”
— Christina Mitchell, Naphcare
“Great class! Engaging instructor. Wish I would have had more time this week to attend his other sessions.”
— Matthew Royalt, Southern Star Central Gas Pipeline
Practical AI Bootcamp Curriculum
3 days.
12 hands-on labs.
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What is Machine Learning?
Data Analyst, Teacher
Why Decision Trees?
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Course Datasets
Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA)
Hands-on Lab #1
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Classification Tree Intuition
Overfitting Intuition
Gini Impurity
Split Quality
Splitting Categorical Data
Splitting Numeric Data
Classification Trees with Python
Hands-On Lab #2
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Under/Overfitting
The Bias-Variance Tradeoff
Supervising the Data
Model Tuning
Classification Tree Pruning
Measuring Awesomeness
Splitting the Dataset
Modeling Tuning with Python
Hands-On Lab #3
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Feature Engineering Intuition
Data Leakage
Decision Boundaries
Engineering Numeric Features
Engineering Categorical Features
Engineering Date-Time Features
Missing Data
Hands-On Lab #4
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Regression Tree Fundamentals
Numeric Feature MSE
Categorical Feature MSE
Feature Evaluation
Tuning Regression Trees
Imputation with Regression Trees
Hands-On Lab #5
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Bad, Tree! Bad!
Ensembles
Bagging
Feature Randomization
Random Forests with Python
Hands-On Lab #6
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Feature Importance
Tuning Random Forests
Model Testing
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Additional Resources
Wanna Kaggle?
Copilot in Excel Prompts
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The following is the 3-day curriculum. The curriculum can be expanded by bundling additional courses (see below).
Introduction to Machine Learning - Days 1 & 2
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Course Expectations
What is Cluster Analysis?
Cluster Analysis Use Cases
The Challenge of Clustering Data
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The Iris Dataset
The Hand-Written Digits Dataset
The Heart Dataset
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Hierarchical, Partitional, and Overlapping Clustering
Prototype Clusters
Density-Based Clusters
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Introducing K-Means
The K-Means Algorithm
Euclidian Distance
The Problem with Outliers
Data Standardization
K-Means Caveats
Hands-On Lab #1
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Evaluating Clusters
Cluster Cohesion
Evaluating Cohesion with the Elbow Method
The Silhouette Coefficient
Evaluating Clusters using the Silhouette Score
Hands-on Lab #2
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Introducing DBSCAN
The DBSCAN Algorithm
DBSCAN Caveats
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Considerations for Optimizing DBSCAN
Calculating min_samples
Choosing the eps Value
Introducing Nearest Neighbors
Evaluating eps with the Elbow Method
DBSCAN vs K-Means
Hands-On Lab #3
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Introducing Dimensionality Reduction
Principal Component Analysis (PCA)
PCA Concepts
Hands-On Lab #4
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The Problem with Categories
Encoding Categorical Data
Factor Analysis of Mixed Data (FAMD)
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Supervised Learning Resources
Cluster Analysis Resources
Copilot in Excel Prompts
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Cluster Analysis - Day 3
Course Add-Ons
Expand your team’s capabilities by bundling additional courses into your bootcamp.
All courses can be taught using Python in Excel.
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Text Mining and Analysis
This 1-day hands-on course is an introduction to the tools and techniques of transforming text data into a form suitable for analytics. Examples include clustering documents and sentiment analysis. Topics include tokenization, stemming, lemmatization, TF-IDF, and cosine similarity.
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Logistic Regression Analysis
This 1-day hands-on course teaches your team how to use logistic regression predictive models to analyze your data with the statsmodels library. Logistic regression is one of Copilot’s go-to techniques when the outcome of interest is in the form of a Yes/No question.
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Linear Regression Analysis
This 1-day hands-on course jumpstarts your team’s skills in using linear regression predictive models to analyze your data with the statsmodels library. Linear regression is one of Copilot’s go-to techniques when the outcome of interest is a numeric quantity (e.g., sales).
FAQs
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Yes! The bootcamp can be delivered virtually or in-person with your team.
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While three full days is ideal for learning, the Bootcamp can be delivered in a half-day format:
Week 1 is four half days.
Week 2 is two half days.
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Yes! This bootcamp assumes your team has access to Copilot in Excel with Python.
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While the courses do include mathematics, it is at a level accessible to a broad audience. For example, no knowledge of calculus or statistics is required.
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All the courses use Python as the programming language. My Python in Excel Accelerator course is included and will teach your team what they need to know before the bootcamp.
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My Visual Analysis with Python online course is included with the bootcamp. It will teach your team the foundational skills they need.