6. Review of Key Analytic Tools on the Market

Thankfully today we have a large number of tools available that can help us perform vital business tasks - hopefully quicker and more accurately than in the past. As a user or business leader though, there's no time to review them all. Find here my summary of some of the most powerful and cost-effective tools available:

Excel:
The tried and trusted partner of businesses across industries and the globe. Excel is a very flexible tool capable of working with data sets that most companies would typically deal with. The ease of transferring Excel files to new hires is crucial for consistency, though is often a painful task with many hidden calculations taking place in old spreadsheets. Microsoft have added features to make Excel better at displaying results (i.e. Sliders) but if you expect many users to access one sheet it's likely to suffer. A fantastic tool for a single user to perform almost any analysis in short order.

Power BI:
Excels new partner. Power BI is Microsoft's key answer to the push for advanced Business Intelligence, greater interactivity in reporting and easier distribution of results in the form of "on-the-go" access. BI has great ability to construct dashboards and program a set of repeated steps to clean up data that Excel would only achieve across a number of formulae. The layout will be familiar to Excel users though it is a little clunky compared to other Business Intelligence tools. As of 2017 the tool is completely free to download and use as Microsoft continue development and updates are added monthly. A fantastic tool for companies or departments who want to explore something more powerful than Excel. The image below shows the button you hit when you want to upload your dashboard to the internet and give access to team members by simply accessing the webpage (even from their phone).

R Studio:
The power of the internet and open collaboration gave us R Studio. A totally free software package developed open source that gives users access to an almost unparalleled analytic suite. R is very unlikely to crash due to the size of a data set it's working with and has a range of packages to enable complex statistical manipulation or simple summaries. The challenge that comes with R is the flexibility it has is enabled by a console that requires you to type in code to generate results. Therefore the learning curve is far steeper with R than Excel. There are plenty of resources online to support learning though and if someone in your team has a little capacity you should push them towards developing in R.

R Shiny:
Another module within the "R family", R Shiny moves R into app form that can be shared and hosted online. This can become then a fabulous tool for deploying analysis to senior leaders or your wider team. In particular the benefit here is you don't prescribe the analysis results. For instance instead of calculating "optimal" inventory and reporting this, you generate an app where leaders can input expected sales and there comfort level of stock-outs and, dynamically, see the impact there preferences will have on inventory management.

Tableau:
Perhaps the prettiest of interactive dashboard publishers available, Tableau is starting to dominate a growing market. There is a license cost that is often around $1,000 per user so there is some outlay to get into this tool. However it contains the ability to automate processes, do calculations live and represent data in multiple formats in such a way that touchscreen and desktop users alike can interact. From personal experience senior leaders tend to react more strongly and quicker to Tableau than other tools and there is a great value in that.