At a time when digitalization has become essential, many professionals are wondering whether it's better to use Excel or an adapted solution to prepare their data. Comparing and contrasting these two work tools will help you identify the advantages and disadvantages of each. The aim of this article is to help you make the right choice as to which tool will improve your productivity, reduce your costs and enable you to achieve the performance you're looking for.
If you're reading this article, you'll probably need a data preparation tool to help your teams. Let us introduce you to our solution: Tale of Data.
To find out more ...
If you'd like to find out more about this topic, take a look at the Excel - Tale of Data comparison table in our white paper!
Data preparation: Excel or a data preparation solution?
Preparing data with Excel
Excel is an excellent tool for creating spreadsheets, charts and reports. Easy to use, Excel can be used by anyone, and enables experienced users to create advanced analytical functions.
However, Excel has its limitations when it comes to data preparation.
In fact, the tool was not specifically designed to handle large quantities of data, nor does it allow work to be reused. Moreover, problems arise when columns contain thousands of values, or when there are numerous duplicates.
Excel does not allow files to be shared easily, and is not really part of a process of industrialization and data reliability. What's more, using filters is often the only way to find outliers in a file, which is time-consuming and tedious, and doesn't allow for any industrialization of the process.
Prepare your data with Tale of Data
With Tale of Data, you can immediately explore your data. In fact, the solution scans all your structured data, automatically identifying any missing, inconsistent or aberrant data (duplicates/triplicates/entry errors, etc.).
What's more, the software also automatically generates processing documentation ("flows" in Tale of Data), making it easy to transfer the file to anyone in the company. The solution is effectively oriented towards collaboration and industrialization of processing. This is not the case with Excel, which is often in "one shot" mode.
Thanks to this data preparation solution, all your data is standardized so that it is accessible and comprehensible to all employees. They will then feel able to pinpoint any superfluous information, identify the origin of a piece of data, and so on.
Data cleansing: manual or automatic?
Clean up your data with Excel :
When you want to clean up, organize and standardize your Excel spreadsheet, you have to do it manually. Similarly, writing formulas requires manual intervention.
Sorting, deleting and adding are time-consuming actions, bearing in mind that spelling mistakes can creep in when adding new elements, calculation errors can be inadvertently introduced, etc.
Clean up your data with Tale of Data :
No manual intervention is required.
The platform takes care of cleaning up your data. Thanks to the artificial intelligence algorithms embedded in the solution, missing, ill-formed or inconsistent data is automatically identified. In fact, the system does most of the work, scanning all the elements and then issuing a data quality audit report.
Suggestions for corrections can be made to help you improve your dataset.
You can choose from 100 ready-to-use transformations in just a few clicks to assemble, normalize, straighten or enrich your data.
The solution also enables data to be checked, verified and modified in a very short space of time.
Tale of Data customers can create business rules in natural language to perform checks tailored to their needs without coding. In other words, users can define control rules using our intuitive, easy-to-use interface with self-explanatory menus.
Data source and import - single or multiple?
Importing data into Excel :
Importing data into Excel is limited. The Excel spreadsheet allows you to import :
Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) files, also known as flat files. These files contain several records (header lines, sales detail lines, invoice or order lines), separated from each other by a specific character (semicolon, vertical separator or pipe(|) or tabulation). The CSV format format is the most popular example.
Files on SharePoint or OneDrive.
SQL databases.
Apart from these files, Excel does not allow the import of other file types.
It should also be noted that Excel has no function for adding attachments.
Import your data into Tale of Data :
Tale of Data lets you import data from a wide variety of sources, either as read-only or write-only files. These include CSV, Excel, JSON and XML files.
Tale of Data also connects to a wide range of file storage or relational databases, a wide variety of data sources: analytical storage, NoSQL, and so on. This enables data to be assembled, prepared and standardized, so that it can be exploited in a format accessible to all trades.
Data sharing: laborious or interactive?
Share your data in Excel :
One of the major limitations of Excel is the difficulty of sharing files with other people in the company. Very often, data is shared by e-mail, which can lead to the creation of multiple versions, erroneous data entry, incomprehensible modifications for some, a lack of interactivity, a waste of time... and so on. If the file owner makes changes to his shared file, other employees have to wait for the data to be updated before they can access it.
The problem of sharing becomes difficult when certain data are not visible. Often, a second file is created to remove rows or columns that should not be shared. Even more tricky is updating the data on both sides, the owner and the person with access to the file. A shared spreadsheet can be customized, and what's perfectly obvious to one user may not be to another.
Sharing an Excel file with another person can :
Create several versions of the file
Incomprehensible modifications
What's more, data cannot be traced. So it's difficult to know who has modified or deleted which row or column, and so on.
Nor does Excel's lack of interactivity facilitate communication between employees. In fact, the impossibility of generating e-mail alerts wastes time and makes it impossible to react in real time.
Share your data on Tale of Data :
Tale of Data lets you work interactively with data. All collaborators can exchange and work simultaneously and directly on the platform. As the system is centralized, all teams can work together in a dedicated, interactive, visual and secure workspace. Thanks to this space, each user can scroll or filter data in an automated and assisted environment.
Last but not least, the automatic generation of documentation simplifies work between employees. They save time and can be more productive with up-to-date, reliable data.
Excel or Tale of Data - How to choose?
By capitalizing on data, thanks to a data preparation solution, companies reduce processing costs and acquire qualitative data in the shortest possible time.
Whatever the number of manipulations or processing operations, Tale of Data allows you to track and record them. Every action carried out by users is self-documented by the solution: the notion of "data lineage".
That said, Excel remains an excellent tool for light data management tasks. However, its capabilities are rather limited and do not allow you to see, for example, the operations performed to clean up a data set.
Another drawback is that you have to save each version, and once the spreadsheet is closed, there's no way of undoing the changes you've made. Excel therefore remains a very good office tool.
It is not recommended as a solution for managing and executing complex tasks.
A true data preparation tool will therefore enable :
audit, rectify and enrich data,
to monitor them, control them and share them with as many people as possible,
guarantee their quality and reliability for analysis and process automation purposes.