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

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

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

1) Interactive with Knowledge Past 1 Million Rows: With Excel, information 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 prospect of Excel crashing – and taking the entire person’s adjustments down with it.

2) Knowledge Profiling: To profile information in Excel, customers usually create filters and pivot tables – however issues come up when a column accommodates 1000’s of distinct values or when there are duplicates ensuing from completely different spellings. And since Excel filters haven’t any visible illustration for every worth, the person should change backwards and forwards between pivot tables and filtered information to get a (partial) understanding of the info.

3) Knowledge Governance and Belief: With Excel, there isn’t any precise audit path or information lineage. You possibly can’t see the steps taken to cleanse a specific dataset, other than spending your time making sense out of advanced macros. And even with that, you could save each model of Excel and apply feedback to mark important adjustments.

These necessities and extra show the place information preparation with Excel solely lacks ‘enterprise’ readiness.