I'm surprised they didn't mention Looker as an alternative (I have zero association with the company). They also missed R. yes it is just a language but its imp

I'm surprised they didn't mention Looker as an alternative (I have zero association with the company). They also missed R. yes it is just a language but its impressive growth and tools make it a compelling alternative. I think the snowplow analytics guys (again zero association) have better and arguably more transparent/honest documentation. Particularly the whole end to end complete process. One of the reasons people like Excel (besides the obvious ubiquity of that software) is that they don't have to put their data on some other service. Some even feel it is more secure (this is perhaps somewhat false). That beings said I don't know if I would ever trust a company hosting all my data collection/warehouse needs like the authors of this blog. They might not do anything bad with the data but they sure do have a lot of leverage on you once you completely rely on them. The other thing is the proprietary data visualization/calculation companies will come and go. I bet Excel will still be here 20 years from now. That is why R and SQL are also good things to learn as well.