Pretty much everyone at some point in their life has had to deal with spreadsheets, but working with them every day is a different story. Love or hate: spreadsheets arouse strong feelings. Quick calculations and fast plots may spark our infatuation, but there are also some major drawbacks that may grate on your nerves over time and bring your love affair to a bitter end.

Superficially spreadsheets seem pretty user-friendly, but as you dig deeper, you’ll find yourself up against some major limitations. They lack the scalability needed to prepare large amounts of data, so analyzing large spreadsheets can become a nightmare: an ineffective, time-consuming, and error-prone nightmare.

Data analysis already plays a key role in the business world, as it helps organizations discover market trends, find data-driven actionable insights, and make informed decisions. And its role is expected to become increasingly strategic. Although spreadsheets are widely used in this field, there are far more suitable tools which greatly enhance job performance.

In this article we’ll go through 3 pain points of spreadsheets that are most likely slowing down your data projects. By asking ourselves some important questions, we’ll highlight the areas that could be improved.

1. Are you having a hard time unlocking key data?

Analyzing data and explaining the outcome to clients and stakeholders is not an easy task with standard spreadsheets. Data preparation often involves complex formulas, where you risk overwriting or modifying the original data, and it’s simply too easy to lose track of what you’ve done, and undoing operations can become a messy affair. Providing convincing data-driven decisions when you’re not sure yourself what happened, can be a struggle to say the least.

2. Are you sure you’re using the right tool for data consistency? 

The risk of data inconsistency with spreadsheets is high. When spreadsheets are shared across teams, data may be updated or modified, consequently creating conflicting copies or duplicates. Human data entry is also a critical element of worksheets, as it’s easy to make mistakes, compromising the whole data integrity of the project.

3. Is your data preparation process resilient to change?

Data preparation with spreadsheets can get very complicated when your data is saved in multiple files, which may also be in different formats. The whole process is also not resilient to change, so whenever your data changes, you must make tricky manual adjustments or even start again from scratch.

It’s time to move on!

It’s time to make a clean break with spreadsheets and move on. When data preparation sucks up the majority of your time, you need to find a new approach. Rulex Platform offers you an innovative way to solve your complex data problems, with its flexible, scalable, and resilient software.

• Seeing the big picture

  In Rulex Platform you can confidently explore data, knowing that the software is tracking your operations for you. If you don’t get the results you expected, you can easily roll back all operations, or even reinstate the original data with a few clicks. This flexibility means you can calmly explain how you reached your conclusions, while wowing your colleagues with interactive dashboards.

• Working safely with large volumes of data

  Rulex Platform can effortlessly manage huge amounts of data, collecting and merging files from multiple formats and sources, so you can view and explore the results in a single environment.

• Make data preparation a piece of cake

  Rulex data preparation is resilient to change, as it can be easily applied to new data without rewriting operations and formulas, so finally your team can stop wasting time on repetitive tasks.

Rulex platform in action

Actions speak louder than words, so let’s see how to perform some data prep operations in Rulex Platform.

To learn more about how Rulex Platform works, sign up to Rulex Academy and follow the course “Moving from spreadsheets to Rulex”. This course helps spreadsheet users smoothly transition to Rulex Platform and explains how the latter solves the most common data preparation issues that many analysts face.

2 big reasons why you should drop spreadsheets and start working like a data scientist

Do your job better

If you’re currently handling data through spreadsheets, upgrading to a data analytics tool adopting data science techniques will have a major impact on your daily work.

How?

By enabling you to get game changing insight independently from your data in minutes not hours, and freeing up time for more strategic work (or even allowing you to leave work on time for once). Let’s dive in deeper…

1. Work independently with confidence

Do you ever need to produce results with zero warning?
Like reporting on average sales on your latest product for a meeting at 10am?
Drag and drop, no-code analytics platforms mean you can get the answers you need autonomously from your data without having to ask (and wait for) your IT department.

2. Work efficiently

Is your data spread over different spreadsheets and database tables, or on remote repositories? Each one designed by a different person, with different ideas?
How on earth are you going to be able to work with all these sources without having a copy & paste meltdown?
Data analytics tools allow you to reshape, merge, and concatenate data from multiple sources and formats quickly and simply.

3. Make your work less stressful and repetitive

Do you ever feel like you’re re-inventing the wheel every day?
Every time your data changes, you have to painstakingly adapt your worksheet formulas one by one.
Data analytics tools let you build workflows which automatically adapt to changes.
For example, with Rulex you can build resilient workflows without writing a single line of code, and schedule them to run daily, sending the results to your inbox while you’re drinking your coffee, in time for that 9am morning staff meeting.

Get a better job

Over a decade ago, the Harvard Business Review predicted that data scientist would be the sexiest job of the 21st century, and with an average salary now over $100,000 and a 28% increase in jobs by through 2026*, they were right!

Along with an increasing demand from companies who are waking up to the value of data science to increase profitability and gain competitive advantage, these numbers are also driven by the chronic lack of data scientists around the globe, with far more job positions open than available candidates.

So it goes without saying that anyone who has data science skills will find themselves instantly in demand, with infinitely better prospects.

How can I get the skills I need?

Whether a better job for you means a promotion in your current company, or a complete career change, there is no doubt that data science skills will make you stand out from the crowd and increase your career prospects.

So how can you get these lucrative skills?

1. Sign up for a hands-on self-paced digital training course, which will allow you to build your data science skills step-by-step.
   Rulex offers a wide range of beginner-friendly interactive courses on its digital training platform Academy – Rulex AI.
2. Get professional certification you can share on your social media and add to your curriculum to get your newly acquired skills noticed ASAP Rulex Certification – Rulex AI.
3. If you’re still in higher education, take data science modules, whether your major is in marketing, supply chain or literally whatever! Don’t underestimate the value of these skills in any field. If your university doesn’t offer such courses, you’ll find that some of the top AI companies do.  Rulex University Program – Rulex AI

References

• *U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
• Towards Data Science: Is Data Science Still a Rising Career in 2021 – Examining the Demand, Supply, and Growth of the Data Science industry to see if it’s still a rising career in 2021
  https://towardsdatascience.com/is-data-science-still-a-rising-career-in-2021-722281f7074c.
• Data Science Central: The Top Skills for a Career in Datascience in 2021 https://www.datasciencecentral.com/profiles/blogs/the-top-skills-for-a-career-in-datascience-in-2021