Excel for Public Health Data Management and Analysis

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About Course

Public health professionals routinely work with surveillance data, outbreak investigation records, vaccination monitoring systems, laboratory databases, and health facility reports. However, many professionals are trained to analyze data without first understanding how to design and manage high-quality databases.

This hands-on course teaches participants how to use Microsoft Excel to manage the complete public health data lifecycle—from a paper-based Case Investigation Form (CIF) to a fully functional outbreak database, epidemiological analysis, dashboard development, and decision-ready reporting.

Using a real-world measles outbreak case study and an advanced Ebola surveillance exercise, participants will learn how to design databases, create data dictionaries, implement data quality controls, calculate epidemiological indicators, perform descriptive analyses, create visualizations, and build professional dashboards for public health decision-making.

Throughout the course, learners will progressively build a complete outbreak investigation database and apply practical skills used by epidemiologists, surveillance officers, monitoring and evaluation specialists, researchers, and humanitarian health professionals.

What You Will Learn

  • Interpret and digitize case investigation forms
  • Design outbreak databases from scratch
  • Create data dictionaries and coding systems
  • Implement data validation and quality assurance procedures
  • Clean and manage surveillance datasets
  • Calculate epidemiological indicators
  • Analyze outbreaks by person, place, and time
  • Build PivotTables and PivotCharts
  • Create epidemic curves and surveillance visualizations
  • Develop interactive public health dashboards
  • Produce epidemiological reports for decision-making
  • Manage measles and Ebola outbreak datasets

Instructor

Wilfred NGWA
Senior Epidemiologist | Founder, epiGuider

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Course Content

Module 1: Introduction to Public Health Data Systems
This module introduces the fundamental role of data in public health practice. Participants will learn how data support disease surveillance, outbreak response, program monitoring, operational research, and evidence-based decision-making. The module also introduces the public health data lifecycle and familiarizes learners with common data sources and case investigation forms that will be used throughout the course. By the end of this module, participants will understand how public health data are generated, collected, managed, analyzed, and transformed into actionable information.

Module 2: Understanding the Measles Case Investigation Form
This module introduces participants to the structure and content of a standard measles case investigation form (CIF). Learners will explore how epidemiological information is collected during outbreak investigations and surveillance activities. Participants will identify demographic, clinical, vaccination, laboratory, and outcome variables that will later be transformed into an electronic database. By the end of this module, learners will be able to interpret a case investigation form and prepare it for database design and data management.

Module 3: Converting a Case Investigation Form into a Database
This module teaches participants how to transform a paper-based Case Investigation Form (CIF) into a structured electronic database. Learners will identify variables, define data types, establish naming conventions, create coding systems, and develop a comprehensive data dictionary. By the end of this module, participants will be able to design a complete outbreak database structure that supports data entry, quality assurance, epidemiological analysis, and reporting.

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