Let me start by saying Excel is an incredibly useful tool. It revolutionized accounting in the 1980s and handles projects from simple personal budgeting to any number of complex processes for businesses. But Excel has limitations—and it’s important to know when and where other tools should be used instead. Case in point? Business analytics.
Excel’s limitations are exactly why executives in major companies across a number of industries are opting for tools created specifically for business analytics and data visualization. Business can’t afford to waste precious resources importing, exporting, editing, and tracking spreadsheets rather than analyzing and making decisions based on the insights provided by data.
Excel operates separately from other systems, proliferates duplication and therefore errors, lacks live data, and is just beginning to allow collaboration. There are also limitations in the amount of data that can be put into a single document, and while Microsoft boasts Excel’s ability to handle millions of rows of data, it doesn’t accommodate the depth and complexity of data that many businesses have today.
Informing your business and making decisions using incomplete, error-prone, or old data can be a huge disservice to your company. So while currently, no business analytics tool can completely replace Excel, it is important to realize its limitations and how you may be stifling your business by not using true BI and data visualization tools for analytics.
These tools, like TIBCO Spotfire®, connect with your existing data sources in an enterprise or department, track changes, foster collaboration, and allow users to aggregate, analyze, and report business data in one place. Rather than spending time weeding through old data, you can rely on live data that better enable business decisions. By using Spotfire, you open a world of new possibilities, including ways to improve operational efficiency and increase revenue.
But that’s not all. Spotfire is filled with easy-to-use features that help spot trends and outliers, perform analysis, and recommend visualizations—all while making governance and legal compliance a breeze.
It’s time to move beyond Excel to a tool as sophisticated as your data.
In fact, we have a number of companies who use Spotfire for finance. Check out some of the customer stories here.
Check Also:
Six Top Technology Trends to Watch in 2018
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Help Companies Move Faster