10 Ways Excel Is Holding You Back From Visualizing More In Tableau

10 Ways Excel Is Holding You Back From Visualizing More In Tableau

Overview: Up to 80% of all time spent on analytics is consumed by preparing data. Data is never perfect and most of the time you need to clean, enrich and join multiple data sets to gain meaningful insight. Many analysts turn to Excel to perform these data preparation functions which can take hours or even days. Datawatch Monarch, the industry standard self-service data preparation solution allows Tableau users to manipulate, filter, enrich, blend and combine disparate data sets in a matter of minutes. When you re done, you can bring it back into Excel or export it directly into the native Tableau format.

1. Understand Your Data Excel makes it difficult to understand your data and to determine what data needs attention before being loaded in Tableau. n Previewing a data table is a very manual process. n You must have multiple spreadsheets open to see which table has the right data. n You also need to create complex macros to hide multiple datasheets. n You quickly understand your data and see data tables before loading. n You can determine the quality of your data and what needs to be cleaned. Excel makes it difficult to understand your data and determine what data needs attention before.

2. Extract Data in Reports and PDFs Excel is extremely limited in its ability to acquire and prepare data trapped within different report and file types, including PDFs. As a result, this data is often excluded from Tableau. n The manual process of copying charts and data from within PDFs into Excel can take hours. n Data brought over into one cell has to be manually parsed into different columns. n Each table in the PDF needs to be manually copied and reformatted. n In one click, you can automatically parse the document into rows and columns. n All of your tables are brought into a standard table format for further data preparation. n Even multi-line reports are intelligently captured into neat rows and columns.

3. Use Data from Websites Excel is unable to automatically remove the noise carried over with data from websites. n When trying to copy data from a website, the layout of the data does not transfer cleanly resulting in messy hyperlinks and missing information. n Hours of formatting is needed to fix the charts in order to merge them with other data sets. n You can parse the website data, stripping out all the noise like ads and graphics and simply bring the selected data into rows and columns.

4. Combine Data Sets Excel makes combining multiple data sets into one a manual and time consuming task. n VLOOKUPs and manual copy/pasting is required to join multiple spreadsheets. n You need to select entire columns and rows in multiple data sets. n You can easily join entire data sets or certain columns with the click of a button. n You can choose from a wide variety of different joins. n Monarch s intelligent design explains the 4 different types of joins you can select from.

5. Fix Missing Data Excel makes finding and fixing missing data a manual and arduous task. n You search for nulls and then replace them with one value. n You have to manually change values of each row and column in the entire data set. n You are helped in identifying missing data n You can simply select the ditto function to fill down the blanks in the entire data set. n You can replace or remove data or nulls with the click of a button.

6. Mask Sensitive Data Excel has no easy way of removing or masking sensitive data. Therefore sensitive data, which is often informative, never makes it into Tableau visualizations. n You have to create complex macros in order to hide sensitive data. n The data is never actually removed from the spreadsheet, it s just hidden which is an IT security issue. n You can securely mask sensitive data like social security numbers or account IDs. n The data can be fully redacted or you can create consistent aliases so you can still aggregate information like customer transactions or patient information. n Different roles can see only the data they are authorized to see.

7. Consolidating Data Tables Excel has no quick or easy way to combine multiple data sets. n When you have multiple data sets with similar data and need to combine the rows together there is a lot of manual copy and pasting. n You simply combine the similar data sets by selecting the two tables and hitting append. n Similar data sets will be recognized and automatically combined when new data is present.

8. History of Your Work Excel's lack of history tracking makes collaborating and backtracking difficult. n When sharing files, you can t see the steps taken to clean the data. n To make any changes, you must change or update all prior work. n You can see every step taken with the data. n You can go back and make edits without redoing the entire process. n Users can collaborate within the file by seeing each other s work.

9. Reconciliation of Reports Excel offers no features to help with reconciling reports. n Significant changes are difficult to see in large data filled reports. n You have to set up rules to color thresholds and keep updating these rule as the data changes. n You will have a full summary of the reports that shows what has changed in the data. n Reports are automatically updated as new data is added.

10. Automate Your Data Prep Excel complicates the processes of automating data prep. n When the data is new, you have to manually redo all of the data preparation steps. n You have to create complex macros in order for reports to change on the fly. n Every step of the data preparation process is automatically captured so it can be reused and automated. n You can run this on a predetermined schedule or you can have it automatically run when new data becomes available. About Datawatch The Datawatch Managed Analytics Platform is an enterprise solution that bridges the gap between the ease-of-use and agility that business users demand, together with the scalability, automation and governance needed by IT. Datawatch data preparation capabilities are available as a stand-alone offering for use with any third party analytic front-end, to load into a data warehouse/data mart, as well as tightly coupled with our visual authoring tool for quickly building visualization applications. datawatch.com 978.275.8222 twitter.com/datawatch 271 Mill Rd., Quorum Office Park, Chelmsford, MA 01824 2015 Datawatch Corporation. All rights reserved. Datawatch and Datawatch Monarch are trademarks of Datawatch Corporation. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are properties of their respective owners. Part ID: 1507Sep_US