Author: Aga Tucholka
Publication date: 07.08.2023
Have you ever wondered what the data analysis tools are for? Imagine that you are planning your vacation 4 months ahead and you would like to check the weather in the place where you want to go. However, what if you get a huge table with some numbers instead of watching the understandable chart? Will it be easy for you to find an appropriate result in 10 seconds? Probably not.
Here is where a data analyst comes. This is the person who can transform the data into comprehensible charts. But how do they manage it? For some time various data analysis programs have been available on the market. In this article, we will see some useful programs for data analysis.
SQL
SQL is a standard language to retrieve, store, and analyze data. Each data analyst can work with it and thanks to this we can get the necessary data in a short period of time. For instance, your manager needs to get the results of the 5 most profitable customers of a given shop ad hoc. Using SQL we can get the result in 3 minutes. Impossible? Not for SQL!
There are some basic commands and functions that you should learn if you want to start analyzing data in SQL. You can find them easily on the Internet. Here is an example of an issue.
Query example in SQL
We were asked to prepare a report with the days of the month and a sum of selling products to modify the transport of products for individual days.
Our query should be as follows:
SELECT day_of_month, sum(name_of_products) FROM name_of_table group by day_of_month
Isn't it simple?
There are a lot of available websites and videos on the Internet that will help you learn more about the ins and outs of SQL.
Python
Python is mostly famous for creating web applications. However, it’s more and more popular with data analysis. In comparison to SQL, Python is tougher to learn but it gives us more opportunities. With Python, we cannot only analyze the data but also create charts, algorithms and models to predict the data and many more.
In order to learn Python, we need to put in more time and effort but it’s incredibly efficient. For instance, we can create a model that can predict the income of a given company the historical data. Sounds interesting? Get familiar with some tutorials and start to create your own project.
Data visualization programs: Power BI and Tableau
They are mostly used by customers or the rest of the company to watch the data in a straightforward and easy way. For example, we are the customers and we want to buy a T-shirt. We know exactly what it should look like. It must fit us, that's why we need to buy a Small size and it must be red. Having these restrictions, we can put them into filters that are available in these programs.
Thanks to this we can find what we are interested in an easy and fast way. The most popular programs to visualize data are Power BI and Tableau. Using them you are able to create a lot of different charts which help the end customers to understand the data. As I mentioned before, there are a lot of tutorials that explain these programs step by step.
Below you can find the example dashboards that were created in these programs.
What programs to use for Data Analysis?
If you plan your future with data analysis I totally encourage you to put your time into learning these programs. Nowadays they are crucial to begin working as a data analyst.
Good luck!