Why Data Analysts Hate Using Excel

Key Takeaways

what's going on everybody welcome back to another video today we're going to talk about why data analysts hate using [Music] Excel now some of you guys out there may be really confused right now because you love Excel and you kind of assumed everybody else loved Excel as well uh but you would be wrong because I think the people who really love Excel are the people who are just getting started in Excel and they just really love it because it can do so many things and it's really easy to use it has a really nice U why I think those people are just people who haven't used Excel enough because when you use Excel enough you start finding a lot of things that are wrong with it and that brings us to the very first thing that I hate about Excel and that would be the data limitation and the performance issues that you have within Excel if you've used Excel long enough you know that you can encounter a data set that is so big it taks up every single Row in the entire Excel spreadsheet and when you do this God forbid you try to actually filter on something and you could be waiting there for literally hours or it will just completely not respond and it will check out it'll be like you are never going to get this filter put on your data it is probably one of the most frustrating things because what happens is I exit out of the Excel I pull the Excel back up and then for whatever reason I try it again and again and it just keeps not working and I think that Excel is somehow going to fix itself or get better but it doesn't and it just every single time frustrates me to no end so for smaller amounts of data Excel is really great but when you start working with a lot more data Excel just really cannot handle it well it becomes extremely extremely frustrating the next thing that I hate about Excel is Version Control now I didn't really get into Version Control or really start using or understanding Version Control until about three or four years of being a data analyst but now that I've been using it for a while I honestly am really mad that Excel hasn't come up with a way to really handle Version Control well yes Excel does have this thing where you can kind of revert back to a previous thing but it doesn't always work and if you save it in a different place it doesn't always save that previous Version Control so it's not a perfect system whatsoever although it does have some version of Version Control there are times where I start digging into data and I start doing all these things and then I save it in a different place and I send it to somebody and I do all these things and then I realize I did a bunch of this stuff wrong I want the raw data and I just I completely forgot to save that raw data in a different file and I just overwrote all of that raw data it has happened way too many times and then I can't revert it back and it frustrates me to no end and so I guess what I am saying or nay pleading is that Microsoft fixes this and if anybody knows how to actually get better version control in Microsoft with another tool or anything shoot me a message I would love to hear it before we go any further I want to give a huge shout out to the sponsor of this video and that is Rapids by Nvidia Rapids is an ecosystem of GPU accelerated libraries made specifically for people like you and me there are even libraries made specifically for pandas within this KF Library there is something called the pandis accelerator mode which is going to speed up your code 50 to 150 times its original speed if just using pandas so if you're using pandas in your actual workflow or you're working with a large amount of data this is going to speed your processes up dramatically and Rapids is so easy to install you just come right over here select the method select what python version you are using copy this command into your command line run it and you are set to go so if you want to install their CF Library I will leave links in the description and they even have this GitHub repository which it explains everything that you could possibly want to know about it again huge shout out to Rapids by Nvidia for sponsoring this video the next thing that I personally hate about Excel is having to use it to work with other team members in other departments or just anybody in general it is great when I can just use it on my computer and save it as weird names as I normally do but then when I try to start working with other team members or other people it does not work well this isn't Google Sheets this isn't something that is online that I can actually type something and they'll see it or they'll you know be able to know what I'm doing I'm doing my own work over here they're doing their own work over here and then when they send it to me I then have to say oh gez they did something else I have to completely change my file to then merge it with their file and it honestly has taken years off of my life the amount of stress and frustration that that alone has caused me at this point I might as well fax a physical copy of the spreadsheet over to them have them mark it up and then fax it back that's essentially what we're working with with Excel when talking about collaborating with others the next thing that I hate about Excel and this is something that I kind of learn to hate over time is the automation piece of excel now with VBA and macros you can automate things but I've become accustomed to a certain level of automation with python and other programming languages where I want to actually automate just about anything I could ever want but with VBA macros you can only do so much and so when I'm working with in Excel I'm doing most of these things manually I'm clicking and dragging and dropping and I can't automate every sing single thing like a could in a different program language or another tool and honestly I try to automate as many things I possibly can so I've tried to automate a ton of things within Excel I just haven't been super successful in it if I'm being honest the very last thing I'm going to mention that I hate about Excel and honestly this list is probably a little bit longer is that the data visualization is definitely lacking within Excel there really are some good basic charts and graphs that you can use within Excel to get basic visualizations but if you try to go beyond the basics they're going to recommend that you use some 3D stacked pie chart which makes absolutely no sense for what you're actually doing so what ends up happening is I have to go to some other tool that has better data visualization and then in the end they want it in an Excel file and so what do I have to do sometimes I have to print it out or sometimes I have to integrate it into Excel that's just a lot of extra work that I don't want to have to do so Microsoft if you are watching I'd be more than happy to come and help you with the data visualization side of excel free of charge well maybe a small charge now with all that being said Excel is still a really great tool there are just some things that just really get under my skin when using Excel and I've been using it for many many years but Excel is a fantastic tool and you still need to know it for data analysis and I think as you get further along that's why people start really not liking Excel is they start using it at the beginning it's great but then they find all these different use cases why it doesn't work and everybody else in the business World everyone else that they're working with wants everything in Excel and so since not everything is super native to excel you have to figure out little workarounds and little ways to get it into Excel which gets super tiring and really frustrating so Excel is kind of that one thing that does really well in a lot of areas just doesn't excel in every single area and so you have all these specialty tools and all these different plugins that you have to do outside of Excel and then bring it back into Excel and that's I think the part that makes people the most frustrated so thank you for listening to this venting session I just needed to get it out there I think it was kind of therapeutic for me to just talk about it um and hopefully some of you guys will agree with me in the comments because it would make me feel better so thank you guys so much for watching if you like this video be sure to like And subscribe and I'll see you in the next [Music] video