Excel vs Tableau

Many feel that Tableau and Excel are competing solutions. Others think they're like apples and oranges. Both tools are used for the analysis of data, however, each of them takes a different approach to exploring data and finding key insights.

1. Excel is a spreadsheet tool, while Tableau is a data visualization tool.

2. Excel is a spreadsheet application used for any calculation, as well as for many statistical operations and data analysis. A lot of data analysts prefer Excel. Tableau is a business intelligence tool for querying and reporting, online analytical processing and analytics. It's a visualization tool that data analysts use to get insights into.

Which software are you supposed to use?

It is not a matter of which product is better to decide which product to use. It's more about what you attempt to do with it because each item has distinct uses. Excel is better at:

Construction and Editing Datasets: While using Tableau, you’d want to import information and analyse it. Data can be shaped and cleaned in many ways, but we cannot easily build a new dataset from scratch or change the data in an existing data set. In this situation, we're better off using Excel, where it's very simple to generate and alter information.

Being familiar: Excel is a component of almost every business in the globe, Tableau is not. Few individuals may therefore feel that adopting and teaching Tableau is a barrier that is not present with Excel. These individuals may find it simpler to stay with Excel if they do the work they want, although this strategy may not work in the long run.

Tableau is better at:

Working with big data:Normal Excel is restricted to 1 million rows. Using Power Pivot removes this restriction, but it may be difficult to refresh big Power Pivot datasets. By comparison, Tableau can easily process big datasets.

Working with information from various sources:It easily connects to a wide range of information sources. Excel is improving mildly in this respect through the use of Power Query, but Tableau still offers users easier experiences.

Exploring Data: Creating Excel charts is not an issue when you know what you want. Although, when you're not sure what ideas you need to discover, the easy-to-use Tableau interface comes in its own right. Creating various graphs rapidly using only a drag-and-drop interface is infinitely better than the comparative Excel experience.

Creating convincing charts: The top priority of Tableau is generating and showing good-looking graphs. On the other hand, Excel's variety of graphs is more restricted, and sometimes older and more obsolete.

Core differences to consider when comparing Tableau and Excel are:

1. Data Discovery-While working with Excel, you need to know where the information needs to guide you to discover critical ideas. Since Excel saves data in a tabular format, this implies that your route to an insight involves mapping the response, constructing formulas and visualizations, and evaluating the information. This makes the method of drilling into data less flexible, making it more difficult to explore information at a cellular level. However, Tableau enables you to explore information freely without understanding the response you want ahead of time. With drill-down and data mixing characteristics built in, you'll be able to spot correlations and trends, and then dig down to know what caused them to occur, rather than the other manner around.

2. Automation- Excel is a static instrument where you load the information and perform the task at hand. You can plug in data from external sources using plugins. To implement the functionalities, advanced knowledge of the features and functions is needed. Automatically refreshing an Excel worksheet involves manually programming processes or creating macros that automatically update the worksheet’s data when you open the file. Tableau is a tad intuitive with creating processes and calculations. When creating calculations in a tabular format, the formula can be typed once, stored as a field and applied to all rows referencing that source. This makes it easier to create and apply recurring processes. Its flexibility also allows users to create custom formulas that aren’t available in Excel’s Power Pivot table.

3. Visualizations- In Excel, information is manipulated at the cellular stage to manually generate visualizations such as graphs, charts, PowerPoint presentations, etc. To make visualization easier, profound knowledge of how the characteristics of Excel works is needed. Tableau visualizes information from the beginning, enabling us to see the meaning straight away. It distinguishes correlations using colour, size, labels and forms, offering context as we drill down and explore on a granular level.