the one skill that’s underrated as a data professional
the most cracked data scientists I know parse through a ton of data manually or through excel - I personally think this is one of the most underrated skills as a data professional.
the instant feedback of excel is unmatched in data processing compared to writing code. you are able to see results and transformations in real time. in code, you have to compile and run your python/sql in order to get an output, and you also lack connection to the last piece of code or data you were analyzing.
these both don’t hold true for excel. excel gives you instant feedback to work with. it lets you comb through the data efficiently, remove outliers with a few clicks, and just run quick experiments that you can undo with ease. everything is interconnected and you can logically step through aggregations/calculations.
in sql and python, the data/variables are usually disconnected and disparate. you run your experiments on one dataset at a time, and continuously modify that single dataset. excel lets you expand and chain that dataset into multiple datasets to run experiments on all of them at once while seeing how the intermediate steps play out.
the age old adage goes "give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe" - next time you tackle work on a new dataset, try loading it into excel and playing around to get a feel for it first.