Hello All,
I'm a high school finance teacher and my students have been working towards the MOS Excel Specialist and hopefully Expert certification.
Next semester our class is starting to get more involved in exploring analytics. We've been approached about doing a meaningful project where we analyze housing data for a municipality over the last decade and rather or not those have been a net positive or negative on the city's operations (due to all the initial and ongoing infrastructure).
Analytics is not the area of finance I built a career in and I'm wanting to make sure I go down the right path with the students. I've been exposed to Rapid Miner, Tableau and much more so with Excel. I don't want to overwhelm my students with multiple pieces of software, and I'm a little overwhelmed with the idea of preparing an authentic project with the students.

Will importing data into Excel and running regressions, along with Pivot Table be sufficient for such a project? I know that is too basic of a statement. I know the city will have all the data on units constructed, population increase, schools added, roads added and costs, etc. The hypotheses is does the city make up these outlays with increases in sales property tax. In terms of descriptive analytics what other charts should I be using?

Feel free to ask me more in depth questions. Thank you in advance for your help.