This week I thought I’d discuss using Excel for analysis. I also wanted to mention something I recently heard at work.

A co-worker of mine swears against using Excel for analysis. He will strive to use any other tool at his disposal.

After discussing his background in business intelligence - and history with tools like Tableau and PowerBI - I can kind of understand where he is coming from based on his current skillset. Stepping backwards from one of those tools into using Excel (which he happily admits to avoiding during his career) likely feels counter-intuitive.

But it was concerning that he suggested a junior analyst on the team should bypass learning Excel entirely, and start learning “literally anything else”.

I saw a couple of problems with this.

1. Since the analyst in question admitted his skills in Excel are very limited his advice wasn’t coming from an experienced point-of view

2. An alternative to Excel wasn’t suggested, except for learning SAS Enterprise Guide (EG). SAS EG is one of the tools we use at work. I think it’s safe to say that basic exploratory analysis can be achieved in SAS EG, but I personally feel that it lacks flexibility. SAS EG is a tool for querying and extracting data rather than analyzing it

After discussing this with my colleague in more detail, I admit that I agreed with his attitude that Excel can be overused in the work place. This is usually due to it being the only tool available. For example, how often have do you see over-engineered work books - complete with some complex VBA code - used as a business-critical workplace application? Despite its versatility, Excel can also be a bit ‘clunky’ when it comes to dashboarding/reporting.

But the important thing to consider is, what’s the right tool for the job? Excel can be a great tool to use for exploratory analysis. It’s an ideal tool for quickly transforming data (e.g. using pivot tables) and then applying some sort of visualization to test a theory or hypothesis. You can repeat the process over-and-over without writing a single line of code. You can even learn the basics of data science in Excel, for which I highly recommend reading Data Smart: Using Data Science to Transform Information into Insight by John W. Foreman.

I also think that Excel is a great place to start learning for anyone new to analytics. With that in mind, from next week I will write the first of two blogs about important formulas and functions to learn in Excel.

What are your thoughts about using Excel for analysis? Do you agree with my colleague’s opinion? Or do you believe that Excel is a useful tool for analysts? Comment below!