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Excel, always and forever. Excel will outlive the heat death of the universe.
Very different use cases. Legacy BI is put in place to provide users specific reports from databases. Tableau is nice but is limited to dashboards and has issues scaling. You could make web reports with r, python, or D3 but requires a lot of custom coding.
Excel is a trash tool and replacing it with analysis in R or Python will allow you to do so much more.
Sure, most people in a company will use it for the basics, but if you are doing any significant data analysis the downsides far outweigh the positives.
There is no reproducibility, it’s difficult to ‘debug’, it cant handle any significant amount of data, and alternatives have a much more in depth portfolio of statistical functions. Even surveys of scientific papers have found excel errors in many of them that have gone overlooked.
Everyone trashing excel doesn't recognize the value it brings. Give it to an non techy, they can use it. Try doing that w python
Or the damage Excel can do!
To follow up a little more seriously, I genuinely do believe Excel is worth more than the tools you mentioned, or Oracle BI, or lots of the other 3rd tier tools. If you are good at excel you will always be able to make a living, if not a princely one. And after you have a couple of the top tier tools and a language or two down, in consulting Excel will serve you next best. The day I stop getting asked Excel questions on non-Excel projects is the day I change my mind.
Agree with Excel. I use it as a scratch pad essentially. Microstrategy and qlik are still relevant. They have good admin features when compared to tableau. I know in qlik you can lock down specific data fields and I don't think you can do you is in tableau. I don't use cognos so no clue there.
D2, I think it's more likely that those defending Excel simply CAN'T use R or python. Excel can do incredible things, but it still has limits. If you're doing heavy duty analytics or data viz work, you should learn both.
I use Excel pretty heavily to socialize results and concatenate long, variable specific subsets in R, Python, and C++. It's super useful in bridging the gap between analytical outputs and socialization.
Excel’s PowerPivot and Power BI are a nice quick way to allow non-tech users to make custom analyses and custom dashboards, so long as that data lives in a backend environment like SQL server etc. Tableau can do this too, and I personally find it prettier and more engaging. If you are building heavy-duty models or doing data cleansing in Excel directly instead of R, Python, Scala, or whatever your flavor is, then it’s going to end up not scaling well, having subtle bugs that take time to find, or making your deliverable so slow and cumbersome to view that all that hard work gets shelved by your client after you leave.