Hello Data Lovers👋
In this article, I explain why consultants must absolutely learn Python 🐍 the new Excel!
Are you ready? Let's go! 🚀
If you are a consultant or you are working in the financial services or other sectors, Excel is your buddy; you can analyze sales data, customers data, build a business case, simulate scenarios and the list goes on and on.
You are surely an expert in graphs, formulae, pivot tables, VBA, PowerQuery, etc. You can crunch a solution quickly but before you know it, your spreadsheet expands in tens of tabs, thousands of rows, and spaghetti VBA — so its readability and maintenance go right out the window.
And when you dare to press F9 to refresh the results, you can grab a coffee and still wait a bit more (if your computer its powerful and has not crashed in between)!
👉🏻 Sounds familiar, right? Probably yes and you are nodding fervently.
Excel Issues
Here are some of the biggest Excel Issues:
- Scalability: Excel has a limit on the amount of rows and columns it can hold.
- Performance: When you work with large datasets increasing at exponential speed, spreadsheets soon run out of memory or utilise most of the CPU and the risk of data corruption goes way up. In addition in complex workbooks, changing one number can affect hundreds of reiterative calculations and Excel takes time to work each one out with also affects the performance of any other applications that require memory space.
- Traceability/Debugging: Often an even small change can corrupt your formula making it extremely hard to identify and fix.
Errors: Excel is notorious for errors being propagated down a column and then across the whole spreadsheet. Scarily, some of them go unseen until it is too late.
Lastly 👉🏻 Data Governance and Operational Risk. In my experience this is the main topic: All spreadsheets start as a small tables, some graphs, quick-fix calculations but some turn into permanent enterprise-grade solutions. They feed a number of business processes, but without a data governance process due to a lack of visibility of the entire landscape lineage, the integrity of many operational and regulatory processes is threatened.
Excel’s role in the Consultant Sector needs to be redefined!
Hello Python
Consultancy firms today are looking for young talent with programming skills. The career and skills of the consultant are gradually and rapidly changing.
So what is the solution?
👉🏻 Learn Python!
Now you are a coder and no longer a simple consultant who use Excel and build a slide on Powerpoint.
What’s Python
Python is a widely used high-level programming language for general purpose programming, created by Guido van Rossum and first released in 1991. Python features a dynamic type system and automatic memory management and supports multiple programming paradigms, including object-oriented, imperative, functional programming, and procedural styles. It has a large and comprehensive standard library.
👉🏻 If you want to learn more about python read this article:
Python Features
- ✔️ Easy: Python is the easiest programming language to learn and implement. It’s indentation based code formatting makes the code easily readable.
- ✔️ Opensource: Python is developed under an OSI-approved open source license, making it freely usable and distributable, even for commercial use.
- ✔️ Platform Independent: Python programs can be developed and executed on multiple operating systems like Linux, Windows, Macintosh, Solaris, and many more.
- ✔️ Popular: Python is the most used, searched, and desired skill today. At the current pace of growth, Python has already surpassed Java or C in terms of popularity.
- ✔️ Rapid Development: Python lets you rapidly build and integrate multiple systems efficiently. Be it complex website, games, IoT app, data analysis, utility tools, AI, ML, or desktop app.
- ✔️ Robust: Python is a high-level language with exception handling features, inbuilt memory management techniques, and dynamically typed
- ✔️ Active Community: Python community is vast, diverse & growing. A community of millions of active, dedicated, and enthusiastic Python lovers across all channels.
- ✔️ Libraries: There is perhaps no task for which a Python library isn’t available. Apart from rich bundled libraries, there are lakhs of third party libraries at PyPi and Conda.
- ✔️ Programming Paradigms: Python supports multiple programming paradigms, like object-oriented, imperative and functional programming or procedural.
Start now!
I know very well that coming new into this can be intimidating, but programming is not about learning the language’s syntax, but mindset and problem solving using the right languages and tools: in this case, Python.
👉🏻 and of course is the answer to your question, you will still use Excel!
Excel is not obsolete but you have to choose the right tool at the right time. Study and improve your career!
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Stay Tuned.