Answered! Businesses use Excel for a varity of reporting systems. What are some of the limitations of using Excel for pivot…

Businesses use Excel for a varity of reporting systems. What are some of the limitations of using Excel for pivot tables/charts? Why does that make software like Tableau more appealing in the workplace?

Expert Answer

Microsoft Excel provides us with a wide variety of features to arrange the data nad also Microsoft Excel considers its pivit table as the most powerful tool in it amongst others .Its no doubt that pivot tool can arrange data in well fashioned manner but users still remain mindful of some important disadvantages while using the pivot table feature and therefore seeks some other options and one of the best selling tool is Tableu. Now listing some of the limitations of Microsoft excel’s pivot tables.

a.) Complexity : Even though Pivot tables can put our data into tabular format but there is complexity associated with it .If you are new to pivot tables or with the data in the source spreadsheet then one can feel the complexity of creation of pivot tables.

Whereas in Tablue or other new reporting tools pivot tables/chart creation has become so easy that even a fresher can start making from the very begining

b.) Source Data :Before the actual loading of data into the Pivot table user must be familiar with the data.Since pivot table arranges the data into tabular format we might have to do dicing of data to make it fit in proper rows and columns,Moreover user also may come into condition where he has to remove some null entries or waste data before loading into pivot table.Also if the source file does not contain any headings,user may have to create those headings because these headings will act as field names when pivot table is created.

In Tableau we have the freedom of eploring data source.It contains many features like drill down and data blending which allow us to find co realtions amongst the fields.

c.) Sharing problem: The pivot tables/charts are platform dependent and thus we have sharing problems.These pivot tables can only be open in Excel only.Whenever these sheets are shared to the users who dont have excel they are even unable to see it.We can anytime covert these sheets into readable formats like doc sheets or pdf files but there also we have a limitation that once converted to other formats they become read-only.Users can not manipulate the tables now.

d.)Visualizations: In Excel we have to first set the data on cell level and then started the visualization on it like creating tables,graphs,bar graphs etc and that has to be manually which is atime consuming process.

In tableu one can visualize the data from the begining .It allows us to drill down the data to a more granular level.

Apart from these here are some other limitations of Excel pivot tables/charts

They are inefficient while dealing with Big data.

We have to manually calculate metrics which is time consuming.

Excel uses less variety of fonts,sizes,shapes as comapres to Tableu and thats why the output is less colourful or eyecatching as comapred to other tools.

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