If you know your Excel pretty well and my question seems nothing short of audacious to you, you are welcome to leave with my apologies. If you think you know your Excel but find this question rather bewildering because in your mind data science has the image of a tool heavy futuristic technology and Microsoft Excel is just a thing from the stone age, (Excel was developed in 1986, it still runs on Visual basic, the foundation of which is from 1967. So, yes, we are talking old stuff here) excuse yourself and read on.
Had it not been for Excel
and of course for Microsoft Access, a lot of experts say, data science as it is today would probably not exist. The basic concepts of data editing and database management applied in these two olden tools are still relevant, in fact top of the order.
There is hardly a better data editing tool for two dimensional data, that is tabular data. Sort them, colour them, add them, delete them, perform small statistical operations with them. All of this on your finger tips. The simplicity adapted by Excel can teach a thing or two to modern day data science tools like Jupyter. The basic design of Excel has not really changed over the years. The fact that it works is established by the use of a similar design by Google sheets. The only remarkable improvement being, sheets let multiple people work in it simultaneously
Excel steps up the game
by perfecting several features related to sorting and filtering data. The inbuilt charts are brilliantly suited for business intelligence representations. The Pivot tables work really well for filtering data. As an easy to handle visualization tool that can handle more than one million rows and little over sixteen thousand columns of data, Excel is formidable.
It is not suited for big data yet but the newly launched analysis Toolpak can employ certain machine learning functions like regression allowing advanced analysis on Excel.
Python fits well inside
Microsoft Excel. Yes, you can get Python live within Excel. Python gets access to Excel’s internal array storage. By running Python in Excel not only do you achieve better data manipulation than what is possible with Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) but also get access to scientific tools like Scipy and Pandas. Python aside you can also run SQL queries on Excel.
It is quite obvious that Excel is digging deep to withstand the data revolution despite the overwhelming competition. Hence it is a good time to join an advanced Excel course. Remember, people are spending more time on their computers than ever creating an unprecedented amount of data during the world wide lockdown. Big companies will need their analysts now more than ever. Do not miss out on this opportunity to skill-up.
