Four Tools to Help you Become a Data Analyst
Gathering and analysing data has changed how business decisions are made and how resources are allocated. Through a better use and understanding of data, business managers can plan and enable better strategies with increased confidence. When understood, the companies data can increase administrative efficiency and add competitive advantage – data analytics provides new insight and actionable intelligence.
Data analytics is the process of examining raw data, understanding the processes underlying that data, discovering the patterns, and drawing conclusions about the information and finally communicating the results in a way that has the biggest possible impact.
So what are some of the tools available that will help you analyse your businesses data and become the data analyst that makes the correct data-driven decisions?
Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Excel is the industry standard for spreadsheets and is the first of the list of tools available for the budding data analyst. Microsoft Excel offers an easily accessible and familiar tool to users to perform financial modelling, put together a quick proof of concept or for that one-time analysis to get a quick conclusion for a new business question.
With the powerful importing tool PowerQuery and the compression capabilities of PowerPivot that extend the capabilities of the normal pivot table data, allow more advanced calculations, and add the ability to import data from multiple sources. Excel is the perfect first tool for any new data analysts’ tool belt.
SQL Server
Microsoft SQL Server (or other relational database) will likely be powering your business’s transactional ERP system. As a future high flying data analyst, knowing how to query your source system using SQL queries will quickly allow you to answer some basic questions. Including; “How many sales did we make last month?” or “How many stock items do we have on-hand?”
Writing a small SQL query can provide you with a quick answer to a question and many results can be exported to Excel for further analysis.
Just be warned, executing any SQL query could have unintended consequences. Especially when querying large data sets; the larger the data set, the more complex the query, the longer the wait to get your results.
This powerful tool can be the utility knife on your data analysis tool belt, it is versatile, but it does require some care to use.
Analytics Tools
Analytics tools such as Business Analytics, TimeXtender and Jet Enterprise are purpose built to collect the data from multiple data sources and rapidly combined this data into meaningful groups that you can then analyse. If you need to gather data, do not do it manually yourself, get a tool to help.
Analytics tools give you the ability to answer a specific set of commonly-asked questions such as “How much profit have we made Year-on-Year over the last three years by region?”, or “What was our best selling over the last quarter?” Analytics tools are a big step into the area of Business Intelligence (BI) reporting and data manipulation.
Analytics tools can provide these answers in easy to understand, fast acting, template type, reports that can assist a business in identifying underlying trends or gaps in the business and improving profitability of the business when understood.
Adding one of these analytics tools to your arsenal is like adding a backpack to your utility belt. It can be a slightly larger than originally expected but will provide nearly any answer to any question – provided it was packed correctly beforehand.
Dashboards
All these tools can mean little to business unless they are presented in a way that is meaningful to the end business users. Sometimes this is done in a simple spreadsheet report with baseline numbers, but more likely this requires a little more glamour and shine.
A powerful in-memory BI tool such as Power BI from Microsoft not only offers a powerful data importing and data manipulation tool all in one (with easy to learn features that allows non-technical users the ability to import and understand their own data) Power BI also offers great visualisation options to present the business data in a meaningful, visual manner. These help to keep critical metrics in the line of sight at all times, helping the members of your team to stay focused on the numbers.
Having a dashboard or visualisation tool (particularly a strong BI focused tool) will finish off your utility belt with the required survival kit. This will get you through the harshest of data values and make a big impact fast.
Just a note of caution; No matter what tool you add to your belt or how you utilise it to understand your data – be aware that a tool is only as good as the data you provide it. If you provide incorrect data to any tool you will get incorrect information out, if you provide insufficient data to a tool you will likely end up with the wrong conclusions.
What does this mean for you?
The business world has changed. There is more data available and more being generated in every aspect of business at a more rapid rate than ever before; there are many different methods and tools to analyse this data. Businesses need to understand this data and require data analysts to guide them through the unknown paths that are this new and scary data jungle.
With the above guide, a fully prepared tool belt will assist you in being that data analyst that guides your business through it all.
[Originally Published on the Karabina/IS Partners company blog]
