Do I need to learn Excel for data analytics?

Excel is an excellent tool for data analysts. Data scientists may cringe at the idea that Excel is a data analysis tool at all, however Excel is best-in-class at producing clear, polished charts and plots of business data. Excel’s plotting library covers a large number of sophisticated chart styles, including stacked area plots, dual axis and combination plots (bars and lines together), sparklines, and bubble plots of different types. It’s also very easy to go from an initial plot to something that is easy to read and polished with a lot of WYSIWYG control over formatting, whereas iPython Notebook requires quite a bit of programmatic parameter fiddling to get there. Excel’s ability to handle long time series data sets is cumbersome, but on the positive side it is easy to tinker with projection models and make one-off data exceptions to work around the messiness of the real world. One great trick for using Excel in one’s workflow is to use Excel for creating certain styles of plots, and then take an area screenshot (command-shift-4 on the Mac) to copy-paste the plot into a slide deck in either Powerpoint or Google Slides. read less