Cutting a lesson down — Turning a request into a question

A note from writing Turning a request into a question, which took three passes to get to something short.

"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 hard part of writing this was cutting it. The first version covered every case; the useful version covers the case you hit on a Tuesday and names the rest in a sentence. Completeness is a property of reference material, not of teaching material, and confusing the two produces something nobody finishes.

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.