Why are people moving to Tableau or qliksense inspite of Excel

[Macgomes]

Hello everyone,,,

I work at a company where Excel is heavily used as the analytical platform.

However, from my observation nobody even knows anything beyond the top surface

and how to use the first layer Ribbon buttons.

Inspite of that, I see that the top level management is pushing for things like

`qliksense`, and there are discussions of web-based display tools like `Tableau`.

I know there are also other open-source tools like `dash`, `bokeh` as well.

Personally, I have always used Matlab and Python/Linux combination and can

pretty much do anything that is necessary with these tools.

Excel by itself with `COM/.NET` integration and with the help of `Java/Python`

integration can be used as a display layer and communicate with servers running

more computationally intensive applications for ML/AI. Ofcourse Excel is not

the best for ML or storing data of course, but its great for adhoc exploration which is

necessary for exploratory data analysis. Ofcourse, you can do the same with

Jupyter, but in Jupyter you have to actually write python code which business

people don't know how to do, as a result you become dependent on some coder to

do it for you. If you build a few plugins which in turn interact with backend

servers which process and analyze the data, it becomes much easier for

business people to use the applications.

I don't hear too much about `Excel` in the data-science community. So I wonder

why has Excel gone down in popularity?

[Vinay_Kapoor · Accepted solution]

Excel is not an "analytical platform". Excel is a personal productivity tool which is excellent at helping an individual see one table of information that is limited to a page or two and then perform mundane filtering and analysis on that table. However, most analytics require collaboration amongst people and teams, they require large scale deployments where hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of people can consume one version of the truth and contribute with their own ideas. Real analytics require blending information and data from multiple sources and consuming that on multiple devices, customized to each individual's needs.

All of these use cases (which just scratch the surface of real analytics needs) require a platform. Excel is not that platform. Qlik is.