I should have been clearer. I've never been "good" at using Excel. So far, I've really only done things that I would think you could do in Excel. Might be a touch overkill, but I'm not sure. I am curious which data manipulation items you are referring to. Any good pointers?

I am going through the Machine Learning for Hackers book, though. So far it has been interesting. I guess I never realized that machine learning is essentially statistics. (Or am I looking at that incorrectly, too?)