Course note — Turning a request into a question

Revised Turning a request into a question this week. The change was small and the reason was not.

"Can you pull the numbers for last quarter" is not a question. Converting it into one is the most under-taught skill in the job, and the one that most separates a senior analyst from a fast one.

The first draft explained the mechanism and stopped. What was missing was the failure: the thing that happens when you get it wrong, described concretely enough that someone recognises it later. A lesson that only teaches the correct version leaves you unable to spot the incorrect one, which is the situation you will actually be in.

It sits in the Foundations module. The exercise is a thinking one rather than a query one — some of this material is about deciding what to compute, and that does not need a keyboard.

Ordering matters here more than in most courses. It follows Rows, grain, and the shape of a dataset and leads into A working setup that will not embarrass you, and reading it out of sequence mostly works but costs you the setup.

Free means free, and it also means we can rewrite it whenever it is wrong. No edition, no errata PDF, nothing to repurchase. The whole course is 36 lessons and the fixes land the day we find them.