Microsoft Excel in the Era of Big Data

We never learned this at school…

Image: Microsoft Icons/Tendril/Behance

It’s a tool we all already know and use in our everyday life. To build reports, create charts, or even schedule projects, we use Microsoft Excel for anything.

But we never really learned to use it. While it is not a major concern for most people, this is starting to cause problems for those working with data who have to deal with complex pipelines and systems.

What if we learn about how to build efficient and consistent spreadsheets? More than just getting closer to this engineering stuff, there are a lot of benefits for our daily tasks to strengthen these files with more efficiency, consistency, and reproducibility designs.

Microsoft Excel and the general misusage

When the Redmond company released Microsoft Excel in 1985 it was already a success. The fresh personal computer market is quite open and with the introduction of Windows 3.0, Excel sales overtake the principal competitor Lotus 1–2–3 from IBM.

Since then, Windows has been installed on more than 85% of the whole personal computer market. Therefore, Excel and all the Office suites are the most used software out there.

This success is not surprising: Microsoft Excel is easy to use, gathers many features, and has a simple user interface. Everybody can use it and it is available everywhere. What more do we want?

In fact, creating a product usable by almost everyone brings some counterparts:

Excel is not learned at school. Everybody can use it and so everyone has a different way to work with Excel. There are no clearly defined consensus or good practices. The fact that we are not aware of these kinds of tools from primary school results in a lack of knowledge once we arrive in the professional world.

Excel is not automatable. Though a programmable language — Visual Basic — is embedded in Excel, it’s still difficult to automate heavy tasks and to communicate with other software. Moreover, it’s still reserved for insiders.