I Chose Excel
When I started my data science journey, I thought that I should master programming and build complex models. While knowledge of programming and modeling are important, a data scientist should also be a good communicator. This is when mastery of data visualization comes in, it is the language that connects a data scientist to a non-data scientist. This gives us the power to influence business decisions. Given this, what is the best data visualization tool to use?
In my line of work, I deal with translating numbers into actionable insights. I do this by creating slides with various charts or by building dashboards. I’ve tried various visualization tools over the past years — Tableau, Qlik, PowerBi, etc., but my go-to tool has always been MS Excel. However, now that I’m taking my graduate studies in data science, I’m able to explore the capability of Python as it’s the main programming language used in our program.
Last week, in our Data Visualization class, we had an activity to understand the baseline knowledge of the class on the course. The task was to present insights from a provided data set using data visualizations. We were given an hour to work on it, so I created a Python notebook and started to load and check the data. Since I’m no expert in Python, I scrambled through my previous notebooks to recall the codes that I need and searched the internet for codes that I can use. This went on for a good 30 minutes. The gif below perfectly depicts the panic that was slowly setting in.
When I realized that I wasn’t making any progress, I decided to then use MS Excel. The fear and panic slowly ease as adrenaline rush took over. It took me less than 20 minutes to create the visualizations. I then spent the remaining time to organize my story in MS PowerPoint. It was a buzzer beater but I’m glad I was able to complete the task.
After the class, I realized that I struggled using Python since I wasn’t using it regularly. MS Excel on the other hand, has been the weapon of choice in my daily battles. It might not be able to handle large datasets and lacks flexibility in doing data visualizations, but it does the work for me. Sometimes, we dwell too much on the tool that we’re using and forget that it all boils down to the quality of insights you were able to generate.
So, what’s the best data visualization tool to use? It’s the one that you’re most familiar with. It may be limited, but you are sure to communicate insights from your data effectively.