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Despite being an engineer and well versed in SQL, the ability to do things quickly in Excel, including whipping up pivot tables, has been a big boost to my care
by xyzelement 3y ago
Despite being an engineer and well versed in SQL, the ability to do things quickly in Excel, including whipping up pivot tables, has been a big boost to my career, especially as I moved more to product and business management.
Pivot tables let you super quickly see how things break down across dimensions and play with that analysis in a way that makes for rapid decision making that's not matched by much else other than established tools for well-defined spaces.
- WendyTheWillow 3y agoI’ve never gotten into pivot tables, mostly because data has always been available in a relational db for my career. But the effort to move the data into one from a spreadsheet is way overkill, so I do think it’s not suboptimal to use them even as an engineer.
- xyzelement 3y agoI can see how all pivot table capabilities can be replicated via SQL but I think some of that becomes very expensive and error prone while being simple drag-drop in Excel/Sheets. The ease of doing it is a key feature. if I have to build a certain report because it's my job, I will do it whatever it takes. If I am just doing extra due diligence for myself, I may not do it if it takes hours of SQL crafting.
- chinchilla2020 3y agoI feel the opposite. I rapidly upload my data to bigquery and start slicing. I can fire out SQL queries way faster than I can click around in excel... and it is reproducible since it's easier to copy-paste a query from history than redo all formatting in an excel sheet later on.
- theshrike79 3y agoThe issue here is "click around" :) The true pros use Excel without a mouse at all.