No prescription for the discussion. I’m just legitimately curious, in your opinion, what tool is completely indispensable, that you MUST have to be able to answer questions for the business and drive decisions & impact?
For me, initially I was going to say Excel, because stakeholders a lot of times want to send or receive data pulls in Excel. However, I was thinking about it more and I’d say Power BI (or another BI tool). A well designed dashboard that’s tailored to the business, goes through UAT process and adopted by the business is self-sustaining and will drive values and decision-making for years.
A well-designed database is definitely a good choice. Definitely requires some thoughtful pipeline design to ensure that the data in the database is valuable.
@dby97 do you think that it’s acceptable for small businesses to use Gsheets as their database, lol? Or do you think everyone should set up a proper database in the cloud?
I think it depends how small, and what kind of data they have. A one person SMB? Sure. A 30 person small biz? If they collect customer data or sell things and have transaction data, it should be stored securely (i.e., not in a spreadsheet). Otherwise, I think it depends on the scale and complexity of the data AND of the business questions. One can filter and do quite a lot of complex data operations in an xls but it’s not the same as, or as powerful as, a query. Obviously using a simple BI interface like Looker can help if the use case is straightforward. So my answer is it depends on context, but as an Analyst I’d always like to have all of the above tools - and more if warranted - at my disposal.
Yeah, that makes sense. And if you want to build good recurring reporting, it’s nice to be able to build queries rather than just relying on building pivotcharts & VLOOKUPs, etc. within a sheet.