Excel: The Cause of, and Solution to, All of Life's (Data) Problems...

Excel seems to cop an awful lot of flak, whether that be at the office water cooler or in online forums, and I don’t necessarily think it’s altogether fair. Of course it has its limitations, and it’s often forced to perform tasks that it just wasn’t designed for, but before we criticise Excel, we ought to ask an important question of ourselves:

“Where would I be without it?”

If you’re prone to criticising it for being too slow, too cumbersome or not really having enough storage capacity to do the things you want it to do right now, think back to your education in data or computing. One of the first things you will have learnt about, aside from Word Processing, is spreadsheets. Can you remember the way your face lit up when you were first shown the possibilities of the now humble spreadsheet? I certainly can.

I’ve had a pretty successful relationship with Excel over the years, and I genuinely have no idea where I’d be without it. My first school IT project was to build a spreadsheet where the user inputted Premier League Football results as they happened, and Excel would automatically calculate, update and sort the League table based on these results. My first VBA project involve creating a simple calculator. Good times!

At University I didn’t touch a spreadsheet for three years, but when I returned to the world of work, I found they were everywhere. I had a really big problem adjusting to this, as my IT teacher at school was quite ideological when it came to spreadsheets, what they should be used for and what they shouldn’t be used for. I discovered businesses using them as databases and systems of record, what is this madness?

But my re-exposure to Excel would prove to be the making of me. My degree result was never going to be good enough for me to move into a graduate programme, so I had to work my way up from the bottom. I started at a major credit card firm, selling insurance products over the phone and all things being equal, I was actually pretty terrible at it – but I survived, and it was thanks to Excel. How? Well I designed a spreadsheet that monitored my performance to target in real-time. It wasn’t spectacular, but it was solid, and as my shifts on the phone lines passed by, I knew exactly what I needed to do in order to hit my targets.

A few jobs later and I was collecting on defaulted debt for one of the largest retail banks in the world, again working on the telephones but this time I was actually good at it. It transpired that being nice to customers who find themselves in a difficult situation actually encourages them to pay – who’d have thunk it? Now because I was good at it, and the basic salary was buttons, bonuses were incredibly important. Again, I created a spreadsheet in Excel to monitor real-time performance, which gave me mini-targets to hit each hour or so and really drove me to perform and earn some significant sums.

It was at this point that my talent for using data to improve performance started to get noticed, sharing my model with other colleagues and helping them to improve too, and ultimately moving into an actual analyst role, purely off the back of my perceived Excel Wizardry. It was in this role that I began to really advance my Excel skills, learning a bit of SAS and using IBM’s Cognos off the side of the desk allowed me to see its limitations laid bare.

Then I was introduced to Tableau and these crazy ideas of ETL, Data Visualisation and Big Data. With Tableau I could take in Multiple datasets – AT THE SAME TIME – and do things with the data that would have taken weeks in Excel. I was making charts and graphs that made Excel look like a GCSE IT project all over again, I was creating maps using geospatial data. Geospatial data!!

I’m not trying to criticise Excel, not in the slightest. What I’m saying is that Excel was my first car, it got me from A to B reasonably quickly and relatively safely. It had helped understand better some of the underlying principles of data analysis, of working with numbers, and it had simultaneously satiated and fuelled the burning desire to explore and push boundaries. The only problem for me, is that those boundaries were increasingly beginning to exceed Excel’s and I needed something with a bigger engine and more power.

No, this article is not a criticism of Excel, it’s a glorification of it as a beginner’s tool for data. It will guide you along the path to become a serious data analyst, you’ll love it and hate it in equal measure until you find those specialised tasks that just take too long or are no longer possible, and then it’s time to move on.

But just like your first car, you’ll never move on fully, it will always have a special place in your heart, and you’ll even still use it for the some of those little odd-jobs it’s so great at doing.