KNIME: Go Beyond Microsoft Excel

Co-Author: Nosherwan Khan

In today's enterprise world Microsoft Excel plays an important role in Decision Making and the fact that 99% of the Decision Making in any enterprise gets a direction through some sort of Data Analysis in Microsoft Excel can not be underestimated. There are many reasons why Microsoft Excel has become such a popular and the go to tool for organizations. Few of the features driving its popularity in organizations are its Ease of Use, Comprehensive Visualization Layers, Pivot Tables and a wide array of formulae.

Microsoft Excel has evolved over time in-terms of data handling and has become a reliable enterprise level Data Analysis tool though it is still unable to handle the ever increasing size of Data and the changing needs of Data Analysis. Few of its limitations includes:

• Microsoft Excel does not support Automation of your Data Analysis Tasks, most of the insights are drawn by Microsoft Excel users by themselves based on their previous experience and exposure.
• Microsoft Excel is not well suited for raw or unstructured data as it does not support you much with your data cleansing requirements.
• Microsoft Excel debugging across Data Analysis is not user friendly and not powerful enough to handle large datasets.

Microsoft Excel is unable to process data beyond ~1 Million Rows and this makes it a road block for Data Analysts. Data Analysis Task in Excel become messy when you have numerous attributes(columns) in your data. I believe Excel users will find it relatable when someone ask them to do Data Analysis over a file of 1GB.

With surging demand of Data Science, Excel users are struggling in handling large amount of Data as well as with learning and implementation of Advance Data Analysis techniques. These advance techniques including Decision Tree, Logistic Regression, Lasso Regression etc. come under the umbrella of Data Science. At best Microsoft Excel provides you with Analysis Tool Pack which does not even come close to the analytical power of any dedicated Data Science tool.

Organizations can be viewed as Decision Making factories, since their decision influence their actions which directly impacts different business aspects such as reducing churn, increasing product sales and profitability as well as manage expenses. Organizations insightful enough to fine tune their actions w.r.t. time constraints will always be one step ahead of their competition.

Organizations with heavy reliance on Microsoft Excel for Data Analysis face another unique problem of increased lead time for actionability as Excel demands considerable time to process and understand your problem statement. Thus Hit and Trial becomes the only option for Excel users when it comes to finding hidden patterns behind the provided data, which makes it quite time consuming for Data Analysts.

Data Science is a proven driver for ROI for any business, the main reason being its capability to figure out the hidden patterns in your data significantly faster than Excel. Furthermore, Excel insights are mostly biased towards the experience and exposure of its users which can lead to inaccurate results and decisions.

To conclude, based on the changing dynamics of Data Analysis and current industry trends, Python and R seems to be the ideal option to tackle any sort of challenge in Data Analysis for organizations of any size. However the condition with Python and R is that you have to learn coding to equip yourself for modern Data Analysis/Data Science techniques. This is usually an avoided area for most Microsoft Excel users therefore there is a need for tools that enable Excel users to equip themselves with the emerging skillset of Data Science and modern techniques of Data Analysis, without writing a single line of code.

Currently there are many tools for No Code Data Science and Advance Data Analysis such as Knime, Rapid Miner, Altryx, IBM Watson Studio however over the years Knime has emerged as a holistic easy to use tool especially for Microsoft Excel users. A person proficient in Excel and Knime will posses an exceptional combination of skills for improving productivity of the Marketing, Sales, HR or Finance team within any organization.

KNIME proficiency is the need of hour, if you are a Microsoft Excel user and are looking for further guidance on KNIME usage and how it can help you to boost your skill set across Data Analysis/Data Science then you should register for our upcoming One Day Free Workshop by DICE Analytics on 14th November 2020. For more details you can visit the link provided below or you can write directly to me on my email address ([email protected]) for further queries or discussion.

One Day Free Training on Knime Registration Link

Eight Weeks Long Knime Training Registration Link