Tools Every Data Analyst Should Know

If you’re looking to break into the data analytics, just like any industry, there’s a set of tools you’ll want to know how to use. The data industry is rapidly changing and it is hard to keep up with the latest tools, but here are some tools and technologies that are here for the long haul.

Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Excel isn’t the sexiest tool to use, but it is the most widely used software for anyone in data analytics. The reason MS Excel is so great is because of it’s vast ability to clean, organize, manipulate, and visualize data. It’s the all-in-one tool for data analyst today. MS Excel also has a very small learning curve to get started and there are tons of tutorials out there to help you get started.

SQL

SQL is the most used database language in the world. With data now in the petabyte levels, you will need to know a database language that will allow you to communicate with the data inside. The reason SQL is the go-to language for data analysis is because many large corporations use some variation of SQL to store their data whether it be Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, etc. You will need to know how to query a database to retrieve useful data and manipulate the data so you can get it ready for analysis.

Tableau

Visualization and communication is vital in becoming a data analyst. You should be able to choose the appropriate charts and graphs in different situation. Tableau is a visualization tool that helps create beautiful dashboards that tell a compelling story. Unlike Microsoft Excel and SQL, Tableau is relatively new, but has been gaining traction over recent years. Tableau also allows you to easily connect multiple data sources (including MS Excel & SQL), making it a great addition to your tool belt.

Python

Python is a general use programming language that has been very important to the data science community. It is used as a substitution to MS Excel to organize and wrangle large sets of data. The reason Python is used, over other programming languages, is because of it’s ability to perform computational tasks with libraries like NumPy, Pandas, and MatPlotLib. Python is very easy to start learning due to it’s human-friendly syntax. As you work with more and more complex datasets, you’ll see the benefits that Python has to offer.

R

A complementary tool to Python is R, an open-source programming language used for statistical computing. R allows you to store a series of complex data-analysis steps. One thing to know about R is that it is not like most programming languages, and is daunting when you first start off.

Power BI

Microsoft’s Power BI has become the market-leading BI analysis and visualizations tool and it is continually being developed on a monthly cycle. In 2020, the Gartner Magic Quadrant marks the suite of tools as the leader ahead of traditional competitors.

Here at Lead-Leap Consulting Limited, our Power BI courses have been developed over many years, with Power BI Desktop taking centre stage as the primary tool to connect to data, transform, model, analyse and visualise the data.

The overwhelming majority of our learners who we meet come to Power BI from Excel. Traditionally, that software has been the go-to solution for assembling our data, calculating with it, and then creating charts and PivotTables to create reports.

I am often asked by customers what skills our Excel users need to develop to use Microsoft Power BI successfully.

While there are transferrable skills between Excel and Power BI, anyone who needs to become competent and confident using Power BI will need to enhance those skills and add to them. Moving from raw data to an interactive report or dashboard – which not only contains analysis but also provides the tools for colleagues to carry out their own analysis – involves some defined steps. And each step has its own skills requirements.

There are many more tools used by data analyst in different industries, but if you’re just starting off, make sure you have a solid understanding of these tools before moving on.

At LEAD-LEAP CONSULTING LIMITED, our students work with all the tools mentioned in this article and multiple datasets to get a complete understanding of real-world data analytics.

Register for our Physical and Visual Data Analytics Training Courses at www.leadleapconsult.com

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