What are the best data analysis tools?
Data Analytics Tools have been a blessing in today’s tech and the data-driven world to maintain the organizational well-being management of companies. Data Analysis is, of course, more than just numbers and figures representing management. There have to be business intelligence analysts or analytics tools providing transparent decision-making insights in understanding several vital areas of a company such as,
· To infer customer trends and behaviors
· Analyze, elucidate, and deliver data in more straightforward and meaningful ways
· To increase company growth and productivity
· Boosts and accelerates effective decision-making
Therefore, in simpler words, data analysis helps collect data, analyzing them, and organizing them to infer productive conclusions from it for business growth. More importantly, it simplifies the decision-making process for better business-level strategies. Several professional business coaches also leverage their knowledge to offer significant and professional insights into data analytics for better understanding.
Now, below is an overview of the types of Data Analysis. These illustrate why and how businesses benefit from data analysis.
Descriptive Analysis
Descriptive Analysis analyzes past performances and strategies and draws what happened so far in the management and service. For example, the Descriptive Data Analytics process helps track KPIs, sales revenues, lead generations, etc., for better well-being management.
Diagnostic Analysis
Once descriptive analysis shows what happened, it’s the ‘Diagnostic Analysis’ to resonate with why it happened. It can be a positive or negative or even a neutral diagnostic result. Hence such advanced data analytics help figure out the reason or root of the matter.
It thus helps in better strategy formulation and improving organization performances.
Predictive Analysis
Predictive Analytics now helps in predicting the future growth of the company. Here, data and trends are derived from past references until the present, and they are used for predicting the future of business growth and productivity hence molding organizational performances.
Prescriptive Analysis
Prescriptive Analysis is the combination of Descriptive, Diagnostic, and Predictive Analytics. This combination plans for action on the inferred data of the organization.
Now that the factors and types of analysis are apparent, it’s time to look out for the best data analytics tools for healthy organizational performances.
What are the best Data Analytics Tools?
Tableau
One of the powerful and fast-growing visualization tools of Business Intelligence, Tableau helps create and simplify raw data easily and understandably. Any professional at any level of his organization can use Tableau, for it also provides customized dashboards.
Data Blending, Real-time data analysis, Data Collaboration are the key best features of Tableau. It doesn’t require any sort of programming skills for operating it. The top companies using Tableau are Amazon, Citibank, LinkedIn, Barclays, etc.
R
R is the leading open-source programming language significantly enhancing statistical modeling and graphical data visualization. Many of its packages are available for loading, manipulation, modeling, and visualization.
It definitely needs a good amount of coding knowledge. Manipulating data is more manageable with packages like plyr, dplyr, and tidy.
Business intelligence analysts use R in top running companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter, Uber, etc., for behavioral analysis, advertising effect, economic forecasting, semantic clustering, etc.
Python
Like R, Python is also an open-source programming language initially designed as an object-oriented programming language for web development and software-oriented works. It is a powerful data analytics tool used by many technical analysts and data scientists.
It currently comprises more developers than Java, consisting of more than 200,000 packages. Data Analysis with Python is related to manipulating, cleaning, and processing data. The top companies using python for data analysis are NASA, Spotify, Google, Netflix, etc.
SAS
SAS is a command-driven statistical software widely used for business intelligence, predictive analytics, and data management.
SAS being proprietary software needs payment before accessing it. It is available for Windows OS and is widely used by both business industries and academics. The top companies using SAS for advanced data analytics are Apple, Deloitte, Covance, etc.
Microsoft Power BI
Microsoft Power BI is yet again a top-ranking business intelligence and analytics tool that supports dozens of data-driven sources. You can create and share trendy reports, visualizations, and customized dashboards.
Except for its Pro and Premium versions, it comes in a free version which is the Desktop version. The top companies using Microsoft Power BI as business analytics tools are Walmart Inc., Apple, Nestle, Tenneco, Ecolab, etc.
Microsoft Excel
Excel is undoubtedly the most popular and widely chosen data analytics software used in the world. Starting from colleges to universities to industrial businesses, Excel is always there for data collection and management.
Excel can be accessed by anyone and doesn’t require a UI for any data entries.
Apache Spark
Having its machine-learning library, Spark is yet another open-source engine that is ideal for many business intelligence analysts. Apache Spark has become one of the top-rated data analytics tools within just a couple of years.
It is pretty easy to learn Spark and can be used from Scala, Python, R, and SQL shells. Its libraries include SparkSQL for SQL and structured data, MLlib for machine learning, SparkStreaming for live data-streaming process, GraphX for graph analytics.
The top companies using the Apache Spark data analytics process are Uber, Slack, Shopify, etc.
SAP Business Objects
SAP BusinessObjects is a centralized suite specializing in Business Intelligence that offers data analytics software for discovering data, analyzing, and reporting them. It carries out some of the complex analyses and additionally allows self-service predictive analysis.
The SAP BO comprises several reporting and analytic applications. Such as WebIntelligence (Webi), Crystal Reports aiming primarily at individual users or small and medium-sized businesses, Query as a Web Service (QaaWS), SAPLumira, self-service data discovery and visualization tool, etc.
Final Round-Up
This article contains the most updated and advanced data analytics tools used by most professional business intelligence analysts. Students and leaders are getting much excited and interested in Data and Business Analytics as a career. Data analysis plays a vital role in every management task.
Several third-party professional institutes/organizations provide extra-curricular courses to help understand the fundamentals, types, and usage more in-depth. One such solution leaders opt for is to seek business executive coaching that offers a team of professional and certified business coaches, which is the EMS Global.
Expert Mind Solution has been a 10-years old consultancy and training firm providing in-depth courses on these issues. They have various approaches that take you immensely in becoming a successful Data Scientist or professional business analyst.