3 Enterprise Requirements Where Data Prep with Excel is Less Than Stellar

Excel has lengthy been the software for enterprise analysts to carry out light-weight knowledge preparation duties – figuring out outliers and errors, aggregating values, and mixing knowledge into one spreadsheet for analytics.  However, all too typically, enterprise customers waste time utilizing Excel to manually profile and course of knowledge.

Truth is that Excel is insufficient for enterprise tasks that comprise large-scale knowledge units, contain group collaboration, and require knowledge accuracy in a brief period of time.

Among many, there are 3 areas the place Excel’s limitations are – to properly put it – limiting and too time consuming for knowledge preparation at scale:

1) Interactive with Data Beyond 1 Million Rows: With Excel, knowledge is restricted to 1,000,000 rows. Even with lower than that quantity, the bigger the variety of rows, the slower Excel will get and the better the possibility of Excel crashing – and taking the entire person’s adjustments down with it.

2) Data Profiling: To profile knowledge in Excel, customers sometimes create filters and pivot tables – however issues come up when a column comprises hundreds of distinct values or when there are duplicates ensuing from completely different spellings. And as a result of Excel filters don’t have any visible illustration for every worth, the person should change backwards and forwards between pivot tables and filtered knowledge to get a (partial) understanding of the info.

3) Data Governance and Trust: With Excel, there is no such thing as a precise audit path or knowledge lineage. You can’t see the steps taken to cleanse a specific dataset, other than spending your time making sense out of complicated macros. And even with that, you should save each model of Excel and apply feedback to mark important adjustments.

These necessities and extra reveal the place knowledge preparation with Excel completely lacks ‘enterprise’ readiness.